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consciousness as it was on Nov. 5th, 2008.
1886 : Folies Bergere stage first revue Once a hall for operettas, pantomime, political meetings, and vaudeville, the Folies Bergere in Paris introduces an elaborate revue featuring women in sensational costumes. The highly popular "Place aux Jeunes" established the Folies as the premier nightspot in Paris. In the 1890s, the Folies followed the Parisian taste for striptease and quickly gained a reputation for its spectacular nude shows. The theater spared no expense, staging revues that featured as many as 40 sets, 1,000 costumes, and an off-stage crew of some 200 people. The Folies Bergere dates back to 1869, when it opened as one of the first major music halls in Paris. It produced light opera and pantomimes with unknown singers and proved a resounding failure. Greater success came in the 1870s, when the Folies Bergere staged vaudeville. Among other performers, the early vaudeville shows featured acrobats, a snake charmer, a boxing kangaroo, trained elephants, the world's tallest man, and a Greek prince who was covered in tattoos allegedly as punishment for trying to seduce the Shah of Persia's daughter. The public was allowed to drink and socialize in the theater's indoor garden and promenade area, and the Folies Bergere became synonymous with the carnal temptations of the French capital. Famous paintings by Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were set in the Folies. In 1886, the Folies Bergere went under new management, which, on November 30, staged the first revue-style music hall show. The "Place aux Jeunes," featuring scantily clad chorus girls, was a tremendous success. The Folies women gradually wore less and less as the 20th century approached, and the show's costumes and sets became more and more outrageous. Among the performers who got their start at the Folies Bergere were Yvette Guilbert, Maurice Chevalier, and Mistinguett. The African American dancer and singer Josephine Baker made her Folies debut in 1926, lowered from the ceiling in a flower-covered sphere that opened onstage to reveal her wearing a G-string ornamented with bananas. The Folies Bergere remained a success throughout the 20th century and still can be seen in Paris today, although the theater now features many mainstream concerts and performances. Among other traditions that date back more than a century, the show's title always contains 13 letters and includes the word "Folie." Buy the Cities Book : A Journey Through The Best Cities In The World http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=77137&ECID=EMC-0000051&pa=EMC-0000051 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| General Interest 1886 : Folies Bergere stage first revue http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihVideoCategory&id=7097 1874 : Winston Churchill born http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=5561 1954 : Meteorite strikes Alabama woman http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=5562 1993 : Brady Bill signed into law http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=5563 |
Saturday 22 November 2008
by: Nathalie Guibert, Pascale Robert-Diard and Adrien de Tricornot, Le Monde
Olivier Pastre: (tax havens) "were selling opacity to two types of clientele: criminals, but also presumably respectable companies quoted on the New York Stock Exchange...." (Photo: Paul Ames / AP Photo)
Le Monde: The crisis has relaunched the debate over tax havens, which shelter two-thirds of hedge funds. Can they be regulated without attacking the offshore centers?
Renaud Van Ruymbeke: No. One can only be surprised that political leaders are suddenly realizing that offshore centers exist! We denounced them, as did other judges in 1996 when we launched the Geneva appeal against these lawless zones, for tax havens are also judicial havens. The judges are working on issues of criminal money, but it's not criminal money alone that transits through these offshore centers. Why have people waited so long to act? It is politically conceivable to remove all their nuisance ability.
Olivier Pastré: We agree on the diagnosis, but not necessarily the solutions. In 1999-2000, the role of tax havens had already been brought to light with the Enron scandal, a company that had indulged in financial and accounting turpitudes unimaginable up until then. The company had created 3,000 "special purpose vehicles" to hide its indebtedness - 1,000 of which were based in the Cayman Islands.... Then we discovered that countries were selling opacity to two types of clientele: criminals, but also presumably respectable companies quoted on the New York Stock Exchange. And nothing was done.... Our differences bear on the means and the timing. We must not be naive: we won't make tax havens disappear with the shake of a magic wand.
R.V.R.: And why is that?
O.P.: All humanity would have to agree for that to be settled. The question is fiscal competition. I don't believe that perfect world governance is likely. So let us be modest, yet still resolved.
R.V.R.: More and more money transits through tax havens: 50 percent of world financial flows. I don't say we have to eliminate them from one day to the next, but that should be an objective. We reproach Luxembourg with harboring untaxed assets. In France, the index of bank and similar accounts (Ficoba) centralizes all bank accounts for the tax authorities (DGI). Why doesn't Luxembourg do the same? That organization's data would be transmitted to the countries involved. It could be a simple rule within the European Community. Let's start by cleaning up our own house!
O.P.: If that proposal is applied, it will have one effect only: to impoverish Luxembourg while Liechtenstein and the Cayman Islands will be enriched by it....
R.V.R.: The same reasoning was upheld for corruption: "If you sanction French companies that bribe African leaders, American companies will take over the market." To escape from this system, a public authority that defends the collective interest is required. Globalization is economic and financial. On a political level, it's in retreat: states want to preserve their prerogatives. Regulation means they agree to delegate part of their sovereignty to an organization that can slap their hands, on the basis of transparency laws common to all.
A sort of financial UN?
R.V.R.: Yes, but not a UN that watches two armies fire on each other!
O.P.: The market economy is like a boxing match. The participants hit each other, but under the eyes of an arbiter and in a ring surrounded by ropes. Those ropes have been slackened. They have to be tightened up again. The crisis has shown that regulations can be useful: even the most die-hard capitalists acknowledge that.
R.V.R.: But there is no arbiter.
O. P.: Let's say that there is a myopic arbiter.... An enormous step would have been accomplished already if the major global financial establishments prohibited themselves from operating in certain tax havens. We must be ambitious, but realistic.
The OCDE has established a list of uncooperative tax havens. Only three tax havens - Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein - figure on that list, while thirty-five others are committed to cooperation. Is that truly the reality of the situation?
R.V.R.: The fact that we have only three acknowledged tax havens, when there are many more in fact, shows all the hypocrisy of the system. It's true that technically the problem is not a simple one to settle. But if, for example, Germany's political will with respect to Liechtenstein seems real to me (Germany infiltrated the banking system of the principality to discover its citizens' hidden assets), that's the first case of a government pounding its fist on the table of a neighboring micro-state. I would like someone to explain to me why we can make war on Iraq, but are incapable of setting a minimum number of rules applicable to little countries that have no military or political weight.
O.P.: We've taken a few nano-steps with respect to cooperation. I don't see tax havens disappearing in the short term because there's no American resolve to cooperate, including from Barack Obama. However, the opportunity to pose the problem is a historic one. Political leaders have discovered that a source of the current crisis was difficulty scoping out bank risks, for technical reasons, and because of their positioning in tax havens. Regulatory authorities will - at least so one hopes - look into this subject. No one could have said in February that Gordon Brown and George W. Bush would nationalize the banks. It's also not impossible that governments will condition their aid on banks making progress in these areas. Self-regulation may also come into play: it is not inconceivable that the biggest world banks should agree not to compete in the matter.
R.V.R.: So I am not the only Pollyanna.... But that would be a minimum. For it's shocking to see banks that benefited from the system be rescued, not by Liechtenstein, but by their own countries' taxpayers. There's a paradox: they condemn governments; they sidestep them, and the day when it all blows up they run home to them.
The obstacles financial magistrates encounter do not incline you to believe in self-regulation....
R.V.R.: When we investigate corruption, we run up against insurmountable obstacles. In twenty-four hours, the money may move from Singapore to Gibraltar, by way of Delaware, Monaco and Liechtenstein. Our investigations end up at the end of several years by hitting a short-circuit: suitcases of cash are withdrawn from one offshore account and deposited in another offshore account. It's an admission of failure.
Solutions come through transparency: to be able to identify the true owners of an account and the real shareholders of offshore companies. A company should have to have a business, a board of directors, officials. Today, I can go to Switzerland and for 5,000 Euros buy a Cayman Islands company with keys in hand and pilot the great oil tankers that circle the planet! Transparency exists inside each state. Control exists in the United States, apart from Delaware which is considered a tax haven by Americans. But at the supra-national level, it's the law of the jungle.
O.P.: Governments are interested in the disappearance of tax havens because they represent tax losses. But no reform has any meaning unless it is integrated in new rules of the game: better control of rating agencies, redefinition of accounting and prudential norms, reduction in the weight of unregulated markets, introduction of a form of hedge fund regulation, etc. That doesn't mean more regulation, but better regulation.
R.V.R.: I'm afraid that once the economy takes off again, regulation will no longer seem necessary. Has the shock been strong enough to induce a resolve for control?
Monaco has committed to make efforts to cooperate. Where is that country, and also Switzerland and London, with respect to those efforts?
R.V.R.: Monaco asserts transparency. But there, as elsewhere, investigations get bogged down when money circulates from one tax haven to another. In the end, it's impossible for us to determine the totality of hidden assets. Monaco remains a black hole of globalization. There's still money laundering going on there. In London, banking secrecy is very strong. It's almost as impossible to get information from the City as it is from Jersey. Switzerland, like Luxembourg, has fiduciary companies that supply financial engineering and organize the circulation of capital in such a way that it cannot be found.
O.P.: I would correct: Monaco is more of a "gray" hole. My own banking experience gives me the certitude that there is less questionable capital in Monaco. As for Switzerland, if a tax haven is a place where significant accounting and financial opacity exists, it's clear that it is one.
Must we abolish bank secrecy?
O.P.: I am, in principle, in favor of bank secrecy; it's a human right, a guarantee of democracy. It should not be upset except with the most extreme caution.
R.V.R.: I can't allow that to go by. If it's a human right, then only three countries in Europe assure that right: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland, since they allow those who are the subjects of banking investigations to contest them! With respect to public interest, there should be no banking secrecy.
Is regulation an issue of morality or of efficiency?
O.P.: If it were only a question of morality, one could be much more pessimistic ...
R.V.R.: On this point, we are in complete agreement!
--------
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. (Photo: Reuters)
Anatomy of a Meltdown: Ben Bernanke
and the Financial Crisis
http://www.truthout.org/112508D
John Cassidy, The New Yorker: A history of the
lead-up to the financial crisis, closely
examining the leadership of Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Tuesday 25 November 2008
by: Scott Lanman and Dawn Kopecki, Bloomberg
The Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC. (Photo: Reuters)
The Federal Reserve took two new steps to unfreeze credit for homebuyers, consumers and small businesses, committing up to $800 billion.
The central bank will purchase as much as $600 billion in debt issued or backed by government-chartered housing-finance companies. It will also set up a $200 billion program to support consumer and small-business loans, the Fed said in statements today in Washington.
With today's announcement, the central bank is starting to use some of the unorthodox policy tools that Chairman Ben S. Bernanke outlined as a Fed governor six years ago. Policy makers are aiming to prevent a financial collapse and stamp out the threat of deflation.
"They're trying to put funds into the system, trying to unfreeze these markets," said William Poole, the former St. Louis Fed president, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "Clearly, the Fed and the Treasury are beginning to take a large amount of credit risk."
The Fed will purchase up to $100 billion in direct debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks and up to $500 billion of mortgage-backed securities backed by Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie Mae, the statement said.
Help for Housing
"This action is being taken to reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for the purchase of houses, which in turn should support housing markets and foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally," the Fed said.
Fannie and Freddie bonds rallied. The yield premium on Fannie Mae's five-year debt over similar-maturity Treasuries tumbled 21.5 basis points to 114.7 basis points as of 8:35 a.m. in New York, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
"The cheaper that they could issue their debt, the more aggressively they should be able to buy mortgages in the secondary market," said Alan Bosworth, director of agency trading at Vining Sparks in Memphis, Tennessee.
Separately, under the new Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, the Fed will lend up to $200 billion on a non-recourse basis to holders of AAA rated asset-backed securities backed by "newly and recently originated" loans, such as for education, automobiles, credit cards and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, the Fed said.
Commercial Paper
The ABS program is similar to the Fed's effort to bring down the cost of financing for commercial paper, the short-term debt companies issue to finance payrolls and other expenses, because it goes beyond banks.
"What the Fed has been trying to do is get a sense of what works and what doesn't work," said Derrick Wulf, who helps manage $70 billion in mostly fixed-income assets at Dwight Asset Management Co. in Burlington, Vermont. "One of the things that has worked is the commercial paper facility."
Wulf added that "it can certainly improve credit conditions for consumers."
The Treasury will provide $20 billion of "credit protection" to the Fed in the lending program, using funds from the $700 billion financial-rescue package. The Treasury said in a statement that the facility may expand over time and cover other assets, such as commercial and private residential mortgage- backed debt.
"Continued Disruption"
On the ABS facility, the Fed is trying to avoid having "continued disruption of these markets" that would limit lending and "thereby contribute to further weakening of U.S. economic activity," the central bank said.
Under the new lending program, known as the TALF, the New York Fed will auction a fixed amount of loans each month for a one-year term. Assets will be held in a special-purpose vehicle to be created by the Fed. The program will stop making new loans on Dec. 31, 2009, unless the Fed Board of Governors extends it.
Lenders providing credit under the TALF "must have agreed to comply with, or already be subject to," executive- compensation restrictions in the October bailout law, the statement said.
The Fed will start buying the direct debt of government- sponsored enterprises - Fannie, Freddie and a dozen federal home loan banks - through primary dealers in government debt from next week. The purchases of mortgage-backed securities will be done through asset managers, and officials aim to begin the effort by year-end.
Purchases of both types of debt "are expected to take place over several quarters," the Fed said.
Tuesday 25 November 2008
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Chicago students rally for a high school re-enrollment program for individuals who dropped out before earning diplomas. (Photo: Tim Boyle / Getty Images)
While there is little question that the United States - with its burgeoning police state, its infamous title as the world leader in jailing its own citizens, and its history of foreign and domestic "torture factories" [1] - has moved into lockdown (and lockout) mode both at home and abroad, it is a mistake to assume that the Bush administration is solely responsible for transforming the United States to the degree that it has now become unrecognizable to itself as a democratic nation. Such claims risk reducing the serious social ills now plaguing the United States to the reactionary policies of the Bush regime - a move which allows for complacency in light of the potentially inflated hopes raised by Barack Obama's successful bid for the presidency. What the United States has become in the last decade suggests less of a rupture than an intensification of a number of already existing political, economic, and social forces that since the late 1970s have unleashed the repressive anti-democratic tendencies lurking beneath the damaged heritage of democratic ideals.
What marks the present state of American "democracy" is the uniquely bipolar nature of the degenerative assault on the body politic, which combines elements of unprecedented greed and fanatical capitalism with a new kind of politics more ruthless and savage in its willingness to abandon - even vilify - those individuals and groups now rendered disposable within "new geographies of exclusion and landscapes of wealth" [2] that mark the neoliberal new world order. Nowhere is this assault more evident than in what might be called the "war on youth," a war that not only attempts to erase the democratic legacies of the past, but disavows any commitment to the future.
Any discourse about the future has to begin with the issue of youth because young people embody the projected dreams, desires, and commitment of a society's obligations to the future. In many respects, youth not only register symbolically the importance of modernity's claim to progress; they also affirm the importance of the liberal democratic tradition of the social contract in which adult responsibility is mediated through a willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invest in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to make use of the freedoms they have while learning how to be critical citizens. Within such a modernist project, democracy is linked to the well-being of youth, while the status of how a society imagines democracy and its future is contingent on how it views its responsibility towards future generations. But the category of youth does more than affirm modernity's social contract, rooted in a conception of the future in which adult commitment and intergenerational solidarity are articulated as a vital public service; it also affirms those representations, images, vocabularies, values, and social relations central to a politics capable of both defending vital institutions as a public good and contributing to the quality of public life.
Yet as the twenty-first century unfolds, it is not at all clear that the American public and government believe any longer in youth, the future, or the social contract, even in its minimalist version. Since the 1980s, the prevailing market inspired discourse has argued that there is no such thing as society and, indeed, following that nefarious pronouncement, institutions committed to public welfare, especially for young people, have been disappearing ever since. Those of us who, against the prevailing common sense, believe that the ultimate test of morality resides in what a society does for its children cannot help but acknowledge that if we take this standard seriously, American society has deeply failed its children and its commitment to democracy.
At stake here is not merely how American culture is redefining the meaning of youth, but how it constructs children in relation to a future devoid of the moral and political obligations of citizenship, social responsibility, and democracy. Caught up in an age of increasing despair, uncertainty, and the quagmire of a global financial collapse, youth no longer appear to inspire adults to reaffirm their commitment to a public discourse that envisions a future in which human suffering is diminished while the general welfare of society is increased. Constructed primarily within the language of the market and the increasingly conservative politics of a corporate dominated media culture, contemporary youth appear unable to constitute themselves through a defining generational referent that gives them a sense of distinctiveness and vision, as did the generation of youth in the 1960s. The relations between youth and adults have always been marked by strained generational and ideological struggles, but the new economic and social conditions that youth face today, along with a callous indifference to their spiritual and material needs, suggest a qualitatively different attitude on the part of many adults toward American youth - one that indicates that the young, especially under the Bush administration, have become our lowest national priority. Put bluntly, American society at present exudes both a deep-rooted hostility and chilling indifference toward youth, reinforcing the dismal conditions that young people are increasingly living under.
The hard currency of human suffering that impacts children is evident in some astounding statistics that suggest a profound moral and political contradiction at the heart of our culture: for example, the rate of child poverty is currently at 17.4 percent, boosting the number of poor children to 13 million. In addition, about one in three severely poor people are under age 17. Moreover, children make up 26 percent of the total population but constitute an astounding 39 percent of the poor. Just as alarming as this is the fact that 9.4 million children in America lack health insurance and millions lack affordable child care and decent early childhood education. Sadly, the United States ranks first in billionaires and defense expenditures and yet ranks an appalling twenty-fifth in infant mortality. As we might expect, behind these grave statistics lies a series of decisions that favor economically those already advantaged at the expense of the young. Savage cuts to education, nutritional assistance for impoverished mothers, veterans' medical care, and basic scientific research, are often cynically administered to help fund tax cuts for the already inordinately rich.
This inversion of the government's responsibility to protect public goods from private threats further reveals itself in the privatization of social problems and the vilification of those who fail to thrive in this vastly iniquitous social order. Too many youth within this degraded economic, political, and cultural geography occupy a "dead zone" in which the spectacle of commodification exists alongside the imposing threat of massive debt, bankruptcy, the prison-industrial complex, and the elimination of basic civil liberties. Indeed, we have an entire generation of unskilled and displaced youth who have been expelled from shrinking markets, blue-collar jobs, and the limited political power granted to the middle-class consumer. Rather than investing in the public good and solving social problems, the state now punishes those who are caught in the downward spiral of its economic policies. Punishment, incarceration, and surveillance represent the new face of governance. Consequently, the implied contract between the social state and its citizens has been broken, and social guarantees for youth, as well as civic obligations to the future, have vanished from the public agenda. Within this utterly privatizing market discourse alcoholism, homelessness, poverty, joblessness, and illiteracy are not viewed as social issues, but rather as individual problems - that is, such problems are viewed as the result of a character flaw or a personal failing and in too many cases such problems are criminalized.
Poor black youth are especially disadvantaged. Not only do a mere 42 percent who enter high school actually graduate, but they are increasingly jobless in an economy that does not need their labor. Marked as a surplus and disposable population, "black American males inhabit a universe in which joblessness is frequently the norm [and that] over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their 20s who were jobless has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 percent.... For dropouts, the rates of joblessness are staggering. For black males who left high school without a diploma, the real jobless rate at various times over the past few years has ranged from 59 percent to a breathtaking 72 percent." [3] For many poor youth of color, punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. For instance, a "Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime ... A Latino boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 6 chance of going to prison in his lifetime.... [and] although they represent just 39 percent of the US juvenile population, minority youth represent 60 percent of committed youth." [4]
Youth within the last two decades are increasingly represented in the media as a source of trouble rather than as a resource for investing in the future and are increasingly treated as either a disposable population, cannon fodder for barbaric wars abroad, or defined as the source of most of society's problems. As Lawrence Grossberg points out, "It has become common to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kids to be blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, and kids as threatening." [5] While youth, particularly those of color, are increasingly associated in the media and by dominant politicians with a rising crime wave, what is really at stake in this discourse is a punishment wave, one that reveals a society that does not know how to address those social problems that undercut any viable sense of agency, possibility, and future for many young people. In spite of the fact that crime continues to decline among youth in the United States, the popular media still represents young people as violent and threatening. When youth are addressed in a more complex term they are either viewed merely as commodities, markets, or simply self-indulgent and irresponsible. Then again, in a society in which politicians and the marketplace can imagine youth only as either consumers, objects, or billboards to sell sexuality, beauty products, music, athletic gear, clothes, and a host of other products, it is not surprising that young people can be so easily misrepresented.
Both the problems that young people face and the sites they inhabit are increasingly criminalized. Under the reign of ruthless neoliberal politics with its hyped up social Darwinism and theatre of cruelty, the popular demonization of the young now justifies responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including criminalization and imprisonment, the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons. School has become a model for a punishing society in which children who violate a rule as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell. Such was the case in Florida when the police handcuffed and arrested 6-year-old Desre Watson, who was taken from her kindergarten school to the Highlander County jail where she was fingerprinted, photographed for a mug shot, and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors. Her crime? The six-year old had thrown a tantrum in her kindergarten class. [6] Couple this type of domestic terrorism with the fact that the United States is the only country that voted against a recent United Nations resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children under the age of 16. [7] Moreover, it is currently the only nation that locks up child offenders for life. A report issued in 2007 by the Equal Justice Initiative claims that "there are 73 Americans serving [life] sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14." [8]
The Bush administration not only waged a war against youth, especially poor youth of color, it also offered no apologies because it was too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. For many young people, the future looks bleak, filled with the promise of low-paying, low-skilled jobs, the collapse of the welfare state, and, if you are a person of color and poor, the threat of either unemployment or incarceration. Youth have disappeared from the concerns of many adults, and certainly from the policies that have been hatched in Washington during the last twenty years. In his acceptance speech, President-elect Obama raised the issue of what kind of country young people would inherit if they lived to see the next century. The question provides an opening for taking the Obama administration seriously with regard to its commitment to young people. Young people need access to decent schools with more teachers; they need universal health care; they need food, decent housing, job training programs, and guaranteed employment. In other words, we need social movements that take seriously the challenge of dismantling the punishing state and reviving the social state so as to be able to provide young people not with incarceration and contempt, but with dignity and those economic, political, and social conditions that ensure they have a decent future. Surely, this is an issue that the Obama administration should be pushed to recognize and address. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Protestant theologian, believed that the ultimate test of morality resided in what a society did for its children. If we take this standard seriously, American society has deeply failed its children and its commitment to democracy. The politics and culture of neoliberalism rest on the denial both of youth as a marker of the future and of the social responsibility entailed by an acceptance of this principle. In other words, the current crisis of American democracy can be measured in part by the fact that too many young people are poor, lack decent housing and health care, and attend decrepit schools filled with overworked and underpaid teachers. These youth, by all standards, deserve more in a country that historically prided itself on its level of democracy, liberty, and alleged equality for all citizens. We live in a historic moment of both crisis and possibility, one that presents educators, parents, artists, and others with the opportunity to take up the challenge of re-imagining civic engagement and social transformation, but these activities only have a chance of succeeding if we also defend and create those social, economic, and cultural conditions that enable the current generation of young people to nurture thoughtfulness, critical agency, compassion, and democracy itself.
References:
[1] I have taken the term "torture factories" from Angela Y. Davis, "Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture" (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 50. The United States has 2,319,258 people in jail or prison at the start of 2008 - one out of every hundred and more than any other nation. See The Associated Press, "A First: 1 in 100 Americans Jailed," MSNBC.com (February 28, 2008). Online: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23392251/print/1/displaymode/1098/.
[2] Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, "Introduction," in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk. eds. "Evil Paradises" (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. ix.
[3] Bob Herbert, "The Danger Zone," New York Times (March 15, 2007), p. A25.
[4] These figures are taken from Summary Report, "America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline," Children's Defense Fund. online at: http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/CPP_report_2007_summary.pdf?docID=6001
[5] Lawrence Grossberg, "Caught in the Crossfire" (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 16.
[6] "Kindergarten Girl Handcuffed, Arrested at Florida School," WFTV.com. (March 30, 2007). Online: http://www.wftv.com/news/11455199/detail.html
[7] Adam Liptak, "Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking a Second Chance," The New York Times (October 17, 2007), p. A1.
[8] Adam Liptak, "Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking a Second Chance," The New York Times (October 17, 2007), p. A1.
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007), and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008).
Saturday 29 November 2008
by: Ryan Croken, t r u t h o u t | Review
An Iraqi stands amid the ruins of the Tawheed Mosque, Baghdad, February 4, 2005. (Photo: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad / Unembedded)
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, as our political figures and talking heads wrangled over the best way to babysit the cradle of civilization at the barrel of a gun, American poet and peace activist David Smith-Ferri had a different idea: he would go to Iraq and ask the people who lived there how they felt. "I wanted to interview Iraqis," he writes, "about the threat of war. Surely, I reasoned, it should matter to us what people in Iraq think."
This presumption, startling in its seeming innocence and radical common sense, underpins the poetic and humanitarian mission of his book, "Battlefield Without Borders: Iraq Poems." Culled from Smith-Ferri's experiences as a writer and importer of contraband medical supplies on three separate trips to the Middle East between 1999 and 2007, "Battlefield" is a staggeringly eloquent portal into the forgotten human dimension of our engagement with Iraq, and an exercise in the project of person-to-person diplomacy. As an unembedded storyteller, Smith-Ferri reinserts Iraqi civilians back into the generally depersonalized conversation we are having about them and without them. Through the uniquely equipped medium of poetry, Smith-Ferri delivers hard-earned insights and reflections that broaden our emotional framework for understanding Iraq, and lend heart-wrenching individuality to an otherwise undifferentiated mass of "irrational people / masked terrorist tribes, hands around throat s." It is in this spirit of reporting not just what is happening, but also who it is happening to that we lift off with the poet on his first visit to Iraq.
It's 1999, and after nearly a decade of military and economic warfare, the nation is in bad shape. Sanctions have decimated Iraq's ability to provide clean water and a functioning medical system. Children are dying by the tens or hundreds of thousands from diarrhea and easily curable diseases. Smith-Ferri and his co-workers drift through pediatric wards that seem more like preludes to morgues than centers of healing. As the same contaminated waters that gurgle in the rivers outside pour from the faucets of hospital sinks, Smith-Ferri pauses to take stock of the situation in meditations that blur the genre lines between field notes and elegy:
Daily, like a sorcerer, the sun warms Iraq's sewage-laden rivers,
conjuring cholera and typhoid and E. coli
that are killing children in this hospital ward,
slowly draining juice from their tiny bodies.
Here lies the desiccated fruit of a generation.
Smith-Ferri and his delegation wander through a malignant landscape where bombings more routine than rain have stolen countless limbs, and fields of depleted uranium have created "nuclear children ... slowly roasting, / leukemia a fire in their bones and blood." Leaning over the deathbeds of these victims, Smith-Ferri and his fellow activists ask an Iraqi doctor - "a grim, tour-weary guide" - what he does to try to provide hope for the patients' parents. The doctor, helplessly flanked by his empty medicine cabinets, responds plainly, "like a metronome," as if bolstered by the authority of his incapacity, "There is no hope. This child will die ... That child will die ... They're all going to die."
Amid this assault of visceral information and a sense of powerlessness that is omnipresent and "pathologic," Smith-Ferri has to struggle to maintain his balance. His encounters with the Iraqis leave him breathless, speechless and existentially "immaterial." He struggles to preserve a sense of identity amid the vast expanses of the desert and the surreal "timelessness of war." Smith-Ferri stands, spectral, beside an innocent young victim in the aftermath of a capricious US missile attack. What words of condolence could he offer to a child whose arm has just been severed by shrapnel, without warning or purpose? The poet has nothing to say.
A one-armed, seven-year-old boy looks right through you.
His black-robed mother,
standing behind his bed,
won't even look your way.
Smith-Ferri's verse is characterized by a tremulous poise that reflects his search for composure, order, justice and an alleviation of suffering. We can almost imagine him taking a break at the end of each line, gathering himself together before proceeding down the page. But his linguistic command of these narratives is as refined as it is raw; these are chiseled, elegant stanzas: cutting, measured, smooth and confident in their authenticity. With empathy and precision, Smith-Ferri fluently translates a foreign trauma into language that is both accessible and unfathomable. Like the blank space that follows a bomb, these words point to the wordless, hinting at the incomparable kind of experience that can only be lived in, and expressed by silence.
But "Battlefield" is full of voices, and not just the author's. With titles such as "Walid's Story," "Amal Speaks," "Ahmed Speaks" and "Suad's Words," many of the poems in this book are either dedicated to, or written in, the voice of the people Smith-Ferri meets. At hospitals and bombing sites, inside a record store, at a dinner party, while kicking a deflated soccer ball with a child on the brink of invasion, Smith-Ferri works tirelessly as a poetic journalist, documenting the mood of the nation, asking Iraqis to share their thoughts, fears, ideas and aspirations. Their responses are seamlessly woven into the text, and are often nestled into a narrative context that endows them with enormous weight and emotive punch. Their voices ring in your ears long after you've turned the page. "If you can heal my child, please take him with you." "What is the mood in the United States? Will they attack?" "Your president is a coward, / fighting a coward's war, / attacking unarmed people ." "You like it here? Why not buy a home in Baghdad? / Prices have never been better!" "I want to show you something. / My left ear does not work, thanks to a car bomb." "The US will find a pretext to attack. / It will either be weapons of mass destruction / or support for terrorism. / No proof will be given." "Five hundred varieties of dates ... One huge one is called donkey's balls."
While these characters express a range of sentiments - anger, valor, resilience, desperation, uncanny hospitality - they share one thing in common: they are all undeniably human. In working towards, as Kathy Kelly, author of the book's foreword, puts it, dispelling "the dangerous notion that only one person live(s) in Iraq, the notorious dictator Saddam Hussein," Smith-Ferri transforms a hazy crowd of very foreign foreigners into a collection of individuals who are extremely relatable and very much "like us." In the world of "Battlefield," people have been turned back into people, and, consequentially, the doors to empathy and communication are swung open. Suddenly re-humanized through the thoughtful deftness of Smith-Ferri's art, the crisis flares in our hands. Iraq is no theoretical quandary. It becomes personal, intimate, active. As the poet continues to bring Iraqi voices to American ears, we realize that these are not conversations to be overheard, but to be absorbed dir ectly. "Tell the American people we are not their enemies. / Tell the American people we love them, / but we must have our lives back!" The message is clear: if you are an American person, these people are speaking directly to you.
"Tell my story ... tell my story ... tell my story ... " After hearing "these same three words" over and over again while traveling around Iraq and through neighborhoods in Jordan where uprooted Iraqis struggle to survive in exile, Smith-Ferri becomes explicit in his intention to relay the insights, appeals and agonies of a deeply misunderstood country.
Here on this page I spill Suad's words,
jagged obsidian chips that lacerate this paper,
its blood marking the hands of everyone who reads this book.
All of this storytelling begs the question: how do we listen? Thusly marked by Suad's bloodied words, how do we respond? "Battlefield" does not answer these questions for us. It is a window, not an instruction manual. It invites us to contemplate our interconnectedness with another people in a world where borders - cultural, linguistic, geopolitical - have been erected to prevent the recognition of a shared humanity. Literally and literarily, Smith-Ferri crosses these borders and bears witness to previously inaccessible realities. After visiting a bomb shelter that became a tomb for over 400 Iraqis after two "very smart" American missiles slipped into the ventilation shaft and incinerated everyone inside, Smith-Ferri is slammed with an inter-culture shock of such bare-faced enormity that it kindles a sudden dark enlightenment:
My eyes were never meant to see this,
to flare like torch, sudden with knowledge,
like windows, to open on this illuminative dawn,
but like tinder in its box (named American, middle class)
to remain cold, untouched,
and far from flintstone truth.
Smith-Ferri's "flintstone truth" burns at the heart of his stories, whose ultimate lesson is perhaps that we ourselves are a part of them. This realization of suddenly being a part of the plot destabilizes the cozy illusion that there are vaguely bad things happening somewhere way over there in a strange land that many of us can't locate on a map. The battlefield has come home. The wounded are laid bare before us. "Fighting them over there so we don't have to think about them over here" loses its absurd currency. Distance is capsized, walls are torn down, and we find ourselves fighting this war not only on our shores, but in our own hearts and minds. What is our obligation to Suad? Where do complicity and culpability lie? "These poems strip us of our innocence," Kathy Kelly observes. "David prods us to be uncomfortable"; he prods us to become sensitized actors in a drama that is already difficult to observe from the air-conditioned mezzanine.
"Battlefield Without Borders" offers brutal, vivid and tender portraits of the fallout of the modern American-Iraqi engagement. Its lessons should be at the forefront of our minds as we try our best to figure out how to respectfully assist in the reconstruction of a country whose history and future have become inextricably linked to our own. More information about the book can be found at its Web site, www.battlefieldwithoutborders.org. All proceeds from the sale of the book are donated to Direct Aid Iraq, a grassroots humanitarian relief organization aimed at providing urgently needed medical care to Iraqis displaced by the sanctions, the invasion and the ensuing occupation. Information about Direct Aid Iraq is available at http://www.directaidiraq.org/.
--------
Ryan Croken is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago. He can be reached at ryan.croken@gmail.com.
Thursday 18 December 2008
by: Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
(Photo: Phil Fersht / ZDNet)
What the world needs right now is a rescue operation. The global credit system is in a state of paralysis, and a global slump is building momentum as I write this. Reform of the weaknesses that made this crisis possible is essential, but it can wait a little while. First, we need to deal with the clear and present danger. To do this, policymakers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.
The first task is the harder of the two, but it must be done, and soon. Hardly a day goes by without news of some further disaster wreaked by the freezing up of credit. As I was writing this, for example, reports were coming in of the collapse of letters of credit, the key financing method for world trade. Suddenly, buyers of imports, especially in developing countries, can't carry through on their deals, and ships are standing idle: the Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year.
What lies behind the credit squeeze is the combination of reduced trust in and decimated capital at financial institutions. People and institutions, including the financial institutions, don't want to deal with anyone unless they have substantial capital to back up their promises, yet the crisis has depleted capital across the board.
The obvious solution is to put in more capital. In fact, that's a standard response in financial crises. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize banks by buying preferred stock - stock that had priority over common stock in terms of its claims on profits. When Sweden experienced a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the government stepped in and provided the banks with additional capital equal to 4 percent of the country's GDP - the equivalent of about $600 billion for the United States today - in return for a partial ownership. When Japan moved to rescue its banks in 1998, it purchased more than $500 billion in preferred stock, the equivalent relative to GDP of around a $2 trillion capital injection in the United States. In each case, the provision of capital helped restore the ability of banks to lend, and unfroze the credit markets.
A financial rescue along similar lines is now underway in the United States and other advanced economies, although it was late in coming, thanks in part to the ideological tilt of the Bush administration. At first, after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Treasury Department proposed buying up $700 billion in troubled assets from banks and other financial institutions. Yet it was never clear how this was supposed to help the situation. (If the Treasury paid market value, it would do little to help the banks' capital position, while if it paid above-market value it would stand accused of throwing taxpayers' money away.) Never mind: after dithering for three weeks, the United States followed the lead already set, first by Britain and then by continental European countries, and turned the plan into a recapitalization scheme.
It seems doubtful, however, that this will be enough to turn things around, for at least three reasons. First, even if the full $700 billion is used for recapitalization (so far only a fraction has been committed), it will still be small, relative to GDP, compared with the Japanese bank bailout - and it's arguable that the severity of the financial crisis in the United States and Europe now rivals that of Japan. Second, it's still not clear how much of the bailout will reach the components of the shadow banking system - largely unregulated financial organizations including investment banks and hedge funds - that are at the core of the problem. Third, it's not clear whether banks will be willing to lend out the funds, as opposed to sitting on them (a problem encountered by the New Deal seventy-five years ago).
My guess is that the recapitalization will eventually have to get bigger and broader, and that there will eventually have to be more assertion of government control - in effect, it will come closer to a full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system. Just to be clear, this isn't a long-term goal, a matter of seizing the economy's commanding heights: finance should be reprivatized as soon as it's safe to do so, just as Sweden put banking back in the private sector after its big bailout in the early Nineties. But for now the important thing is to loosen up credit by any means at hand, without getting tied up in ideological knots. Nothing could be worse than failing to do what's necessary out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow "socialist."
The same goes for another line of approach to resolving the credit crunch: getting the Federal Reserve, temporarily, into the business of lending directly to the nonfinancial sector. The Federal Reserve's willingness to buy commercial paper is a major step in this direction, but more will probably be necessary.
All these actions should be coordinated with other advanced countries. The reason is the globalization of finance. Part of the payoff for US rescues of the financial system is that they help loosen up access to credit in Europe; part of the payoff to European rescue efforts is that they loosen up credit here. So everyone should be doing more or less the same thing; we're all in this together.
And one more thing: the spread of the financial crisis to emerging markets makes a global rescue for developing countries part of the solution to the crisis. As with recapitalization, parts of this were already in place during the autumn: the International Monetary Fund was providing loans to countries with troubled economies like Ukraine, with less of the moralizing and demands for austerity that it engaged in during the Asian crisis of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Fed provided swap lines to several emerging-market central banks, giving them the right to borrow dollars as needed. As with recapitalization, the efforts so far look as if they're in the right direction but too small, so more will be needed.
Even if the rescue of the financial system starts to bring credit markets back to life, we'll still face a global slump that's gathering momentum. What should be done about that? The answer, almost surely, is good old Keynesian fiscal stimulus.
Now, the United States tried a fiscal stimulus in early 2008; both the Bush administration and congressional Democrats touted it as a plan to "jump-start" the economy. The actual results were, however, disappointing, for two reasons. First, the stimulus was too small, accounting for only about 1 percent of GDP. The next one should be much bigger, say, as much as 4 percent of GDP. Second, most of the money in the first package took the form of tax rebates, many of which were saved rather than spent. The next plan should focus on sustaining and expanding government spending - sustaining it by providing aid to state and local governments, expanding it with spending on roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.
The usual objection to public spending as a form of economic stimulus is that it takes too long to get going - that by the time the boost to demand arrives, the slump is over. That doesn't seem to be a major worry now, however: it's very hard to see any quick economic recovery, unless some unexpected new bubble arises to replace the housing bubble. (A headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion captured the problem perfectly: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.") As long as public spending is pushed along with reasonable speed, it should arrive in plenty of time to help - and it has two great advantages over tax breaks. On one side, the money would actually be spent; on the other, something of value (e.g., bridges that don't fall down) would be created.
Some readers may object that providing a fiscal stimulus through public works spending is what Japan did in the 1990s - and it is. Even in Japan, however, public spending probably prevented a weak economy from plunging into an actual depression. There are, moreover, reasons to believe that stimulus through public spending would work better in the United States, if done promptly, than it did in Japan. For one thing, we aren't yet stuck in the trap of deflationary expectations that Japan fell into after years of insufficiently forceful policies. And Japan waited far too long to recapitalize its banking system, a mistake we hopefully won't repeat.
The point in all of this is to approach the current crisis in the spirit that we'll do whatever it takes to turn things around; if what has been done so far isn't enough, do more and do something different, until credit starts to flow and the real economy starts to recover.
And once the recovery effort is well underway, it will be time to turn to prophylactic measures: reforming the system so that the crisis doesn't happen again.
Financial Reform
"We have magneto trouble," said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn't working. He also said this: "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Both statements are as true now as they were then.
How did this second great colossal muddle arise? In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we redesigned the machine so that we did understand it, well enough at any rate to avoid big disasters. Banks, the piece of the system that malfunctioned so badly in the 1930s, were placed under tight regulation and supported by a strong safety net. Meanwhile, international movements of capital, which played a disruptive role in the 1930s, were also limited. The financial system became a little boring but much safer.
Then things got interesting and dangerous again. Growing international capital flows set the stage for devastating currency crises in the 1990s and for a globalized financial crisis in 2008. The growth of the shadow banking system, without any corresponding extension of regulation, set the stage for latter-day bank runs on a massive scale. These runs involved frantic mouse clicks rather than frantic mobs outside locked bank doors, but they were no less devastating.
What we're going to have to do, clearly, is relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression. I won't try to lay out the details of a new regulatory regime, but the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn't a crisis so that it doesn't take excessive risks. Since the 1930s commercial banks have been required to have adequate capital, hold reserves of liquid assets that can be quickly converted into cash, and limit the types of investments they make, all in return for federal guarantees when things go wrong. Now that we've seen a wide range of non-bank institutions create what amounts to a banking crisis, comparable regulation has to be extended to a much larger part of the system.
We're also going to have to think hard about how to deal with financial globalization. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis of the 1990s, there were some calls for long-term restrictions on international capital flows, not just temporary controls in times of crisis. For the most part these calls were rejected in favor of a strategy of building up large foreign exchange reserves that were supposed to stave off future crises. Now it seems that this strategy didn't work. For countries like Brazil and Korea, it must seem like a nightmare: after all that they've done, they're going through the 1990s crisis all over again. Exactly what form the next response should take isn't clear, but financial globalization has definitely turned out to be even more dangerous than we realized.
The Power of Ideas
As readers may have gathered, I believe not only that we're living in a new era of depression economics, but also that John Maynard Keynes - the economist who made sense of the Great Depression - is now more relevant than ever. Keynes concluded his masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with a famous disquisition on the importance of economic ideas: "Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
We can argue about whether that's always true, but in times like these, it definitely is. The quintessential economic sentence is supposed to be "There is no free lunch"; it says that there are limited resources, that to have more of one thing you must accept less of another, that there is no gain without pain. Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes's world - and ours - was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding.
We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.
- November 20, 2008
Thursday 27 November 2008
by: Lyndsey Layton, The Washington Post
The US Food and Drug Administration has found industrial chemicals melamine and cyanuric acid in samples of baby formula made by major US manufacturers. (Photo: Alexander F. Yuan / AP)
Public health groups, consumer advocates and members of Congress blasted the Food and Drug Administration yesterday for failing to act after discovering trace amounts of the industrial chemical melamine in baby formula sold in the United States.
"This FDA, this Bush administration, instead of protecting the public health, is protecting industry," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the FDA budget. In an interview, DeLauro said she wants the agency to disclose its findings and to develop a plan to remove melamine from formula. "We're talking about babies, about the most vulnerable. This really makes me angry."
The FDA found melamine and cyanuric acid, a related chemical, in samples of baby formula made by major U.S. manufacturers. Melamine can cause kidney and bladder stones and, in worst cases, kidney failure and death. If melamine and cyanuric acid combine, they can form round yellow crystals that can also damage kidneys and destroy renal function.
Melamine was found in Good Start Supreme Infant Formula With Iron made by Nestle, and cyanuric acid was detected in Enfamil Lipil With Iron infant formula powder made by Mead Johnson. A spokesman for Nestle did not respond to repeated calls and e-mails for comment yesterday.
Gail Wood, a spokeswoman for Mead Johnson, said the company does not think that cyanuric acid poses a health threat to infants. "Cyanuric acid is approved by the FDA to sanitize processing equipment," she said. "The risks of not sanitizing equipment are far greater than ultra trace amounts of residual cyanuric acid found in the formula."
The FDA has been testing hundreds of food products for melamine in the aftermath of a scandal this year involving Chinese infant formula tainted with melamine. Chinese manufacturers deliberately added the chemical to watered-down formula to make it appear to contain higher levels of protein. More than 50,000 Asian infants were hospitalized, and at least four died.
The FDA collected 87 samples of infant formula made by American manufacturers, tested all but 10 of them and held a conference call Monday with manufacturers to alert them to the preliminary findings, FDA spokeswoman Judy Leon said. She said she did not know when the agency was planning to inform the public.
The test results were unearthed by the Associated Press, which had filed a request for records under the Freedom of Information Act.
Leon said that the amounts discovered are safe and that parents should continue to feed formula to their children. "We know that trace levels do not pose a risk whatsoever," she said.
That contradicts the agency's recent statements about melamine, including a position paper that was on its Web site yesterday that asserted there are no safe levels of melamine for infants. "FDA is currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns," the document said.
Agency scientists have maintained they could not set a safe level of melamine exposure for babies because they do not understand the effects of long-term exposure on a baby's developing kidneys. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that infant formula is a baby's sole source of food for many months. Premature infants absorb an especially large dose of the chemical, compared with full-term babies.
"Just one month ago, the FDA had been very clear about how they could not set a safe level of melamine in formula for babies," said Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization. "Now they're saying trace levels are no problem. What changed?"
The FDA thinks the melamine and cyanuric acid got into the U.S. formula as a byproduct of manufacturing and not as a result of tampering, Leon said. Melamine is found in plastic food packaging and in cleaning solutions that are sometimes used in food processing equipment.
The FDA spokeswoman said no illnesses have been linked to melamine consumption in the United States.
But Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union, said that may not be true. "Given that this is not a problem that American doctors are used to dealing with, we can't be sure that if a small number of these cases developed, the connection would be made," said Halloran, who wants the formulas to be recalled from store shelves. "We just don't know."
Halloran said it is also possible some babies are receiving a variety of infant formula and could be ingesting melamine in one bottle and cyanuric acid in another bottle, creating a dangerous mix.
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who is on the House Commerce and Energy Committee, is also seeking a recall. "Until they establish a safety standard, how can they say what's safe?" he said. "They need to pull this."
Critics said the FDA's reassurances about products carry less weight after the recent controversy over bisphenol-A, a chemical found in plastic baby bottles, dinnerware and the linings of food cans. The FDA dismissed a growing body of scientific evidence that has linked BPA to health problems even as worried consumers stopped buying BPA-containing products. Instead, the FDA relied on two industry-funded studies that concluded that BPA did not pose a health risk. Last month, the agency's science advisory board said the agency should no longer maintain that BPA is safe.
"When FDA claims there isn't any reason to worry, that's exactly what the consumer should do," said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group. "The once-revered public health agency has morphed into a taxpayer-funded public relations arm for the very industries it was created to oversee."
Wednesday 26 November 2008
by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog
A young John Maynard Keynes. (Illustration: Encyclopedia Britannica)
The economy has just about come to a standstill - not so much because credit markets are clogged as because there's not enough demand in the economy to keep it going. Consumer spending has fallen off a cliff. Investment is drying up. And exports are dropping because the recession has now spread around the world.
So are we about to return to Keynesianism? Hopefully. Government is the spender of last resort, which means the new Obama administration should probably be considering a stimulus package in the range of $600 billion, roughly 4 percent of national product - focused on building and repairing the nation's crumbling infrastructure, providing help to states to maintain services, and investing in new green technologies in order to wean the nation off oil.
But between now and late January, when the stimulus package will be voted on, we're likely to be treated to a great debate over the wisdom of Keynesianism. Fiscal hawks will claim government is already spending way too much. Even without the stimulus package, next year's budget deficit is likely to be in the range of $1.5 trillion, considering the shrinking economy and what's being spent bailing out Wall Street. The hawks also worry that post-war baby boomers are only a few years away from retirement, meaning that the costs of Social Security and Medicare will balloon.
What the hawks don't get is what John Maynard Keynes understood: when the economy has as much underutilized capacity as we have now, and are likely to have more of in 2009 and 2010 (in all likelihood, over 8 percent of our workforce unemployed, 13 percent underemployed, millions of houses empty, factories idled, and office space unused), government spending that pushes the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.
Conservative supply-siders, meanwhile, will call for income-tax cuts rather than government spending, claiming that people with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, too. Income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people, and they tend to save rather than spend.
Even if a rebate could be fashioned for the middle class, it wouldn't do much good because, as we saw from the last set of rebate checks, people tend to use extra cash to pay off debts rather than buy goods and services. Besides, individual purchases wouldn't generate nearly as many American jobs as government spending on infrastructure, social services, and green technologies, because so much of we as individuals buy comes from abroad.
So the government has to spend big time. The real challenge will be for government to spend it wisely - avoiding special-interest pleadings and pork projects such as bridges to nowhere. We'll need a true capital budget that lays out the nation's priorities rather than the priorities of powerful Washington lobbies. How exactly to achieve this? That's the debate we should be having between now and January 20 or 21st.
Saturday 29 November 2008
by: Marcia Mitchell, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, whose landmark federal whistleblower case against the US Environmental Protection Agency resulted in passage of the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act), is being fired from the EPA. (Photo: Stacey Cramp)
The senior EPA analyst whose historic anti-discrimination case led to legislation protecting whistleblowers is being fired from her job at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo sees her ouster as the ultimate act of retaliation, a payback for continuing her fight to protect federal employees who speak out against wrongdoing in government agencies.
The agency has long taken a stand of not commenting on Coleman-Adebayo's claims, only to deny that the EPA has ever discriminated or retaliated against her.
The election of Barack Obama has given Coleman-Adebayo both hope and concern. "I see triumph, but I also see vulnerability in what lies ahead," she says.
Writing in The New York Times six years ago, Coleman-Adebayo optimistically envisioned the possibilities that would come from passage of what was the first civil rights law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). At the time, her optimism was justified. No FEAR passed by a unanimous act of Congress - the first time a major piece of civil rights legislation was so honored. Coleman-Adebayo stood directly behind President George W. Bush when the act was signed into law.
Change was in the air, but not for long and not for everyone. "I have been the continued target of reprisal and harassment, a common fate of whistleblowers," she says.
"Many of us with a long history of service in federal agencies are now seeing an intentional personnel purge, especially at more senior staff levels. It seems that those who express initiative, creativity, and new ideas are the first to go," said Coriolana Simon, another former EPA employee.
Every two years, or 90 days after acceptance into federal service, all employees must now take No FEAR training based on the veteran analyst's successful legal case, Coleman-Adebayo v. Browner. Carol Browner, defendant and former EPA administrator, is now serving on the president-elect's transition team and was reported by the Washington Post to be the "obvious choice" if the new administration names an "environmental czar."
This possibility worries Coleman-Adebayo and, she says, "many of us who lived through the Browner administration."
She adds that, "Despite the jury's verdict, despite the legislation that flowed directly from that verdict, and despite a Government Accounting Office corroboration of the jury's findings, Ms. Browner never reprimanded any of the managers under her authority who were guilty of discrimination and retaliatory tactics."
Coleman-Adebayo says Browner made no attempt to comply with the No FEAR law. "She delivered a chilling message to her subordinates within the agency, saying that it would require more than something called the No FEAR Act to change business as usual at the EPA."
There is no question that Coleman-Adebayo's unexpected departure from the agency where she has worked since 1990 will have ramifications for the new administration. The senior analyst is highly respected and has a substantial following; in fact, Washington insiders have speculated that the new administration might well select her as the next EPA administrator. She certainly is well qualified.
Regardless, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo, whose personal struggle from a poor background to a prestigious university doctorate parallels that of the president-elect, will be out of a job by the end of the year. It is rumored that her dismissal - and that of a handful of others - is a move to "clean out" the agency, to get rid of "troublemakers" before the present administrator, Steve Johnson, leaves office.
The plaintiff's problems at EPA began in 2001, when she blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation whose operation in South Africa was causing vanadium poisoning throughout an entire community. Her insistence that the problem be corrected led to a pattern of discrimination and harassment against her, and no quick fix for the people suffering and dying from vanadium exposure. She reports having been called a "whiner" and other, more profane names for taking a stand unpopular at the agency.
Ultimately, Coleman-Adebayo and the EPA met in a courtroom, where the jury found in the plaintiff's favor and against the federal agency. What happened that day led directly to the No FEAR Act.
It was only the critical first step in an incomplete journey, according to Coleman-Adebayo.
"I urge the Obama administration, within the first 100 days, to endorse the No FEAR II and Congressional Disclosures Protection acts - two bills currently before Congress that continue the spirit of the original legislation." They do so, she says, while providing the means to enforce compliance by managers who flout the rules.
Coleman-Adebayo's situation is not unique in the waning days of the Bush administration, even with the new whistleblower act in place.
Recently fired Department of Commerce employee Janet Howard said, "The purge is taking place across the board in every agency in the federal government. It seems like a well-thought-out plan to eradicate African-Americans and others who speak out against discrimination and corruption."
A senior manager who has been in the Department of Transportation for over 20 years said, "I have several witnesses who are willing to come forward about my current supervisor targeting me. The agency has failed to investigate this, and this is true at the highest levels of management within the agency."
Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, the personal representative of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to three presidents and Congress in the 1960's, and the Congressional representative of the District of Columbia for 20 years, said, "The Bush administration, using tactics reminiscent of old Soviet-style coups, is embedding its foot soldiers deep into the federal government in order to sabotage forthcoming Obama initiatives, while simultaneously terminating federal employees whom Bush officials fear would be supportive of President-elect Obama's goals. It is a two-step process - step one is to get rid of whistleblowers who would expose wrongdoing and step two is to burrow operatives whom they know will continue the wrongdoing."
When Coleman-Adebayo shared optimism for passage of new protective legislation at a recent American University symposium based on the newly released book, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop A War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion," she had no idea her days as a federal employee were numbered. Present at the symposium and offering support, along with fired British secret service officer Gun, was whistleblower icon Daniel Ellsberg. It was an impressive gathering, made more so by the dedication and determination of those present.
There is no question that hope for the future was in the air. And hope is what it's all about at the moment.
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Marcia Mitchell is co-author with Thomas Mitchell of "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq War" and "The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War."
Saturday 29 November 2008
by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
An Indian soldier stands in front of the still smoldering Taj Hotel in Mumbai. (Photo: David Guttenfelder/AP)
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai call out to President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors to rethink the signature blunder of George W. Bush's eight years in office - the so-called War on Terror. As US intelligence reports have made clear, the centerpiece of the supposed campaign against terror, the military occupation of Iraq, has increased the likelihood of more attacks like those in Mumbai, Madrid, London and Manhattan. The new escalation in Afghanistan will similarly increase terrorist attacks there, in neighboring India and Pakistan, in disputed Kashmir, and throughout the world.
Bush and Cheney chose the word "war" with malice aforethought. From the start, they intended a military response, first against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And, as Barton Gellman shows so brilliantly in his book "Angler," Dick Cheney and his team consciously wanted to create a wartime presidency with enormous unchecked power and scant regard for basic American liberties.
By contrast, Obama's advisors openly acknowledge that military force alone will never bring victory over terrorism. They would, in addition, provide more economic aid, use counter-insurgency tactics to pacify local populations, and work with surrounding regional powers, including Iran.
But Obama and his people still talk far too much about using military force and delude themselves into believing that the physical defeat of Al-Qaeda will significantly weaken the current terrorist threat.
Though it's still too early to know who staged the attacks in Mumbai, they were most likely militant jihadis, possibly with links to Kashmiri rebels and renegade elements of Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI. Al-Qaeda may or may not have played a role in the planning.
But even if Al-Qaeda did, how would killing Osama bin Laden - if he's still alive - or hanging all of his top aides, or hammering the Taliban in any way defuse the toxic brew of often justified grievances and outrageous religious fanaticism that we now face? The enemy is not a single man, and not a single group. It is a movement of shared ideas and beliefs, all too often encouraged by Washington's pursuit of policies that are both unjust and counter-productive.
The terrorist bloodshed started long before bin Laden and will continue long after his dialysis machine packs up. No magic bullet will end it, but military boots on other people's ground will almost always make matters worse. That's what they did in Iraq. That's what they are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What bin Laden added to the mix was the well-articulated idea that terrorist attacks could promote a clash of civilizations, or holy war. With his War on Terror, George W. Bush, the Crusader-in-Chief, responded exactly as bin Laden wanted, turning moderate Muslims around the world into terrorist supporters, funders, and enablers. Why would Obama want to continue the madness?
To gain perspective, Obama might ask his advisers to brief him on the very different wave of terrorism that spread from Russia, through Europe, and into the United States between 1881 and 1914. The terrorists were mostly anarchists, and they killed, among others, Czar Alexander II, King Umberto I of Italy, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, and the president of the United States, William McKinley.
The assassinations shook the established powers throughout the Western world. One terrorist, a Bosnian nationalist, even triggered War I when he assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in historic Sarajevo.
The new media of the time, the daily newspaper, naturally exaggerated the threat, spreading the terrifying specter of the crazed anarchist bomb-thrower. Just as naturally, the papers gave considerably less coverage to another image of the age - that of the government-paid agent provocateur.
In time, the anarchists themselves saw that their violence, their propaganda of the deed, was not sparking the revolutionary movement they wanted, and they turned instead toward organizing workers into unions. But, even at the time of the greatest murder and mayhem, I can think of no government that ever went anywhere near as far as the Bush administration in making the fight against terrorism a question of military force.
Today's terrorists have far more deadly weapons at their disposal, as Dick Cheney always told us. But today's police and intelligence services have more than enough technology to meet the threat. What they need is far greater international cooperation, which a reliance on the military makes more difficult.
Similarly, Islamic societies around the world have more than enough creativity to see the dead end into which terrorism leads. What they need is time and space to adapt to a changing world.
Barack Obama is in a unique position to build cooperation and encourage Muslims everywhere to find their own way forward. Happily, he has made a good start by announcing that he will close Guantánamo and end the horrors of torture. He has also raised the hope, however faint, that he will work toward a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians and between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Even more to the point, his pledge to build a green economy will reduce any argument for continuing American support of despotic governments in countries with large reserves of oil and natural gas.
All this is promising. But it remains only a promise, and all of it will come to naught if Obama gives the orders to continue killing people and breaking things wherever and whenever the United States wants.
Saturday 29 November 2008
by: David Barstow, The New York Times
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.
Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. "No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed," he said.
Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq's expanding military.
"That's what I pay him for," Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.
General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help - "He's got the heart of a lion" - or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.
He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan "not in the right ballpark" and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
"We've got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks," he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.
Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.
Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.
General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington's power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the "left hook" assault on Iraqi forces.
But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.
His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.
At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.
The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.
Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.
On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC's viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.
The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an "independent voice" who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, "There's no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves."
General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC's formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been "incredibly forthcoming" about his ties to military contractors.
General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.
"My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld's arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan," the statement said. "The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration - or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity."
In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies "strategic counsel." His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. "Never has been a problem," he wrote. "Period."
General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism - that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war "on the cheap" - reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military's uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.
With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush's major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.
In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon's inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article's publication, sought to transform the analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.
General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.
More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.
A Move to Television
General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.
They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.
Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.
Veritas would compete on both fronts.
Just days before the terrorist attacks - on Sept. 6, 2001 - Veritas had announced the formation of an "advisory council" of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. "They can really pick up the phone and call someone," Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.
Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey "opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to."
Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth - a key to successful I.P.O.'s - required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.
From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane - also a source of Veritas contracts - a "national treasure."
In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no "discernible benefit" from General McCaffrey's television appearances and called his TV work "completely independent" from his role with Veritas.
In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey's fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.
General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld's resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld's team, he said, was bent on making an "ideological" point that wars could be fought "on the cheap." There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a "grossly anemic" force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.
That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.
"These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less," he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.
In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.
In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. "They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war," he said.
Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the "astonishing amount" of postwar planning.
And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, "What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?" he replied, "Well, I don't think I have any real serious ones."
Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. "We've placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security," he told Katie Couric on "Today."
Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey's access to the Pentagon's special briefings and conference calls.
General McCaffrey was stunned. "I've never heard his voice like that," recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, "They showed him what life was like on the outside."
Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.
"There is a time when you have to punt," said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey's friend, not as his spokesman.
Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his "great respect" for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. "Is this man O.K.?" the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.
For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. "I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq," he told Mr. Williams that June.
A Corporate Troubleshooter
Mr. Rumsfeld's swift reaction underscored the administration's appreciation of General McCaffrey's influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.
Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.
These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey "got his information," records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.
In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey's lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general's recurring criticisms had cost him "business opportunities with defense contractors." NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon's analyst briefings.
On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like "Meet the Press," they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command's generals.
The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command's generals expected him to "publicly support their efforts" upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to "reverse the perception" in Washington of a lost war.
After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing "after action" reports on his firm's Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command's generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.
At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.
Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp's revenues.
The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas's prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.
What is more, some of DynCorp's Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp's determination to make things right.
"It is useful both ways," Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. "If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them."
Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. "He'll say: 'I'm going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?' " Mr. Lagana said. "And then he'd go in and say, 'I'm on the board. What can you tell me?' "
The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp's 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars' worth of contracts in Iraq.
General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp's executives in Iraq.
Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq's security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp's board, he had described these forces as "badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable." Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his "surprising" conclusion that the training was succeeding.
After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq's new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. "The Iraqi security forces are real," General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.
His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp's profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.
"I took as objective a look at it as I could," he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.
A Contract in Iraq
In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was "governance, not marketing," and Veritas insisted that he never "solicited new or existing government contracts."
General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.
As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.
General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.
In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation's discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.
That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into "Pol Pot's Cambodia."
The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as "very sober-minded."
General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey's ties to Global Linguist.
NBC executives asserted that the general's relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC's Web site, where General McCaffrey's biography now features a link to his consulting firm's Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey's clients.
While the general's Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey's connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.
CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks's role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)
On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp's stock jumped 15 percent.
Hiring a General
After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq's military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions' chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq's decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling "leftovers" from depots across Eastern Europe. "I was looking for an advocate," Mr. Ringgold recalled.
General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. "Frankly," Mr. Ringgold recalled, "I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me."
General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell "Americanized" armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?
The suggestions vastly increased the proposal's scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.
His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a "phased redeployment" of American combat forces - the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.
In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received "innumerable" letters from "would be" contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey's material "without any endorsement" to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq's security forces.
General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq's defense minister. "Quite frankly," he said, "I thought it was a good idea."
General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first "sanitized" them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.
General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley's first words: "Why aren't we doing this already?"
Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.
On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his "principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces," and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could "speak objectively - before politics goes to roar level."
In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.
General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq's army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey's integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. "He's not going to cross the line," General Dubik said.
Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey "made it perfectly clear" that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq "to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest."
But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. "General McCaffrey insisted that I see you," Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.
General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold's message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq's defense minister was still hesitant. "They've gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff," General Dubik wrote.
Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.
The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq's "failure to ready its Army" was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. "The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order," he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.
Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, "I hope he was thinking of us."
Mr. Weiner, the general's longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients "to get your mission achieved in the media." General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.
"His motive is pure," Mr. Weiner said. "It is national interest."
Despite Defense Solutions' efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars' worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.