UNDERNEWS

UNDERNEWS
NOV 13, 2005
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source

E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
1312 18th St. NW #502 Washington DC 20036
202-835-0770
202-835-0779 FAX

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
WORD
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -
Bertrand Russell

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PAGE ONE MUST
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

SENIORS JOIN CHILDREN IN BEING LEFT BEHIND BY BUSH REGIME

ROBERT PEAR, NY TIMES Enrollment in the new Medicare drug benefit begins
in three days, but even with President Bush hailing the plan as "the
greatest advance in health care for seniors" in 40 years, large numbers
of older Americans appear to be overwhelmed and confused by the choices
they will have to make. At a senior center in Urbana, Lynn Heskett of
the Ohio Senior Health Insurance Information Program described the drug
plan to a full house. "I have a Ph.D., and it's too complicated to suit
me," said William Q. Beard, 73, a retired chemist in Wichita, Kan., who
takes eight prescription drugs, including several heart medicines. "I
wonder how the vast majority of beneficiaries will handle this. . .

"The whole thing is hopelessly complicated," said Pauline H. Olney, 74,
a retired nurse who attended a seminar at a hotel in Santa Rosa, north
of San Francisco. . .

In most states, beneficiaries have a choice of more than three dozen
prescription drug plans. Premiums, deductibles, co-payments and covered
drugs vary widely. Many retirees also have other options: getting drug
coverage through former employers or through Medicare-managed care
plans. In Kansas, Medicare beneficiaries have a choice of 40
prescription drug plans charging premiums from $9.48 a month to $67.88 a
month. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/national/13drug.html

PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES - At first, the benefit will look like a normal
insurance plan, with a deductible and co-payments. But if your
cumulative drug expenses reach $2,250, a very strange thing will happen:
you'll suddenly be on your own. The Medicare benefit won't kick in again
unless your costs reach $5,100. This gap in coverage has come to be
known as the "doughnut hole." . . .

One way to see the bizarre effect of this hole is to notice that if you
are a retiree and spend $2,000 on drugs next year, Medicare will cover
66 percent of your expenses. But if you spend $5,000 - which means that
you're much more likely to need help paying those expenses - Medicare
will cover only 30 percent of your bills. A study in the July/August
issue of Health Affairs points out that this will place many retirees on
a financial "roller coaster."

People with high drug costs will have relatively low out-of-pocket
expenses for part of the year - say, until next summer. Then, suddenly,
they'll enter the doughnut hole, and their personal expenses will soar.
And because the same people tend to have high drug costs year after
year, the roller-coaster ride will repeat in 2007.

How will people respond when their out-of-pocket costs surge? The Health
Affairs article argues, based on experience from H.M.O. plans with caps
on drug benefits, that it's likely "some beneficiaries will cut back
even essential medications while in the doughnut hole." In other words,
this doughnut will make some people sick, and for some people it will be
deadly.

The smart thing to do, for those who could afford it, would be to buy
supplemental insurance that would cover the doughnut hole. But guess
what: the bill that established the drug benefit specifically prohibits
you from buying insurance to cover the gap. That's why many retirees who
already have prescription drug insurance are being advised not to sign
up for the Medicare benefit.

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/opinion/11krugman.html?hp

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST OIL FIELD UNABLE TO MEET PRODUCTION PREDICTION

AME INFO - It was an incredible revelation last week that the second
largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output.
Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.
The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million
barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for
the rest of the field's 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki
told Bloomberg.

He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day
but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate. Kuwait will now spend some $3
million a year for the next year to boost output and exports from other
fields.

However, it is surely a landmark moment when the world's second largest
oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost
60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait's proven oil
reserves. This is also not what forecasters are currently assuming.

Forecasts wrong Last week the International Energy Agency's report said
output from the Greater Burgan area will be 1.64 million barrels a day
in 2020 and 1.53 million barrels per day in 2030. Is this now a
realistic scenario?

The news about the Burgan oil field also lends credence to the
controversial opinions of investment banker and geologist Matthew
Simmons. His book 'Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock
and the World Economy' claims that the aging Saudi oil filed also face
serious production falls.

The implications for the global economy are indeed serious. If the world
oil supply begins to run dry then the upward pressure on oil prices will
be inexorable.

http://www.ameinfo.com/71519.html

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

COLLAPSE OF SEA AND BIRD LIFE IN PACIFIC REPORTED

GEOFFREY LEAN, INDEPENDENT, UK - A catastrophic collapse in sea and bird
life numbers along America's Northwest Pacific seaboard is raising fears
that global warming is beginning to irreparably damage the health of the
oceans. Scientists say a dramatic rise in the ocean temperature led to
unprecedented deaths of birds and fish this summer all along the coast
from central California to British Columbia in Canada. The population of
seabirds, such as cormorants, auklets and murres, and fish, including
salmon and rockfish, fell to record lows.

This ecological meltdown mirrors a similar development taking place
thousands of miles away in the North Sea. . . Also caused by warming of
the water, the increase in temperatures there has driven the plankton
that form the base of the marine food chain hundreds of miles north,
triggering a collapse in the number of sand eels on which many birds and
large fish feed and causing a rapid decline in puffins, razorbills,
kittiwakes and other birds.

The collapses in the Pacific are also down to the disappearance of
plankton, though the immediate cause for this is different. Normally,
winds blow south along the coast in spring and summer, pushing warmer
surface waters away from the shore and allowing colder water that is
rich in nutrients to well up from the sea bottom, feeding the
microscopic plants called phytoplankton. These are eaten by zooplankton,
tiny animals that in turn feed fish, seabirds and marine mammals.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1113-04.htm

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
IRAQ
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

WHO SAID THIS?

Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and
security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their
mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. Their
purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and
indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the
world.

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the
world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons. I want to
explain why I have decided, with the unanimous recommendation of my
national security team, to use force in Iraq; why we have acted now; and
what we aim to accomplish. . . The international community had little
doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam
Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

ANSWER: President William Clinton, December 16, 1998

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html


||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
POLITICS
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

THROWING BAD NUMBERS AT HOWARD DEAN

[ONE OF THE REASONS politics isn't covered better is because so many
journalists - former poli sci or history majors - can't add or have
better things to do. . . like quote establishment Democratic Party
insiders on what the numbers mean]

CHRIS CILLIZZA, WASHINGTON POST - The Democratic National Committee
under Howard Dean is losing the fundraising race against Republicans by
nearly 2 to 1, a slow start that is stirring concern among strategists
who worry that a cash shortage could hinder the party's competitiveness
in next year's midterm elections. The former Vermont governor and
presidential candidate took the chairmanship of the national party eight
months ago, riding the enthusiasm of grass-roots activists who relished
his firebrand rhetorical style. But he faced widespread misgivings from
establishment Democrats, including elected officials and Washington
operatives, who questioned whether Dean was the right fit in a job that
traditionally has centered on fundraising and the courting of major
donors.

Now, the latest financial numbers are prompting new doubts. From January
through September, the Republican National Committee raised $81.5
million, with $34 million remaining in the bank. The Democratic National
Committee, by contrast, showed $42 million raised and $6.8 million in
the bank. . .

One House Democratic leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to preserve relations with Dean's operation, put it more
bluntly: "There is plenty of time, but the red flashing sirens should be
going off there.". . .

In the previous election cycle, the DNC had raised $31 million, compared
with the RNC's $80 million, at this point in 2003. But the cash-on-hand
disparity -- the main concern of party strategists -- was less daunting
then, with the RNC sitting on $27 million to nearly $10 million for the
DNC. . .

[Many grafs down]

Finney noted that the DNC has staff in 38 states and will have
organizers in every state by the year's end. She also noted that it
donated $5 million to the winning gubernatorial campaign of Virginia Lt.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

[If you cut through all the analysis, you will discover that Dean - the
real target of this story - has raised $11 million more than the
Democrats had raised at this point in 2003. While this is far less than
the GOP, it is also true (and unnoted) that Democratic contributions are
up 37% while the GOP's are up only 2%. As for the "cash disparity," that
could have easily been handled by not putting $5 million into the
Virginia campaign. Is that where "Washington operatives" think Dean went
wrong? Moral: if you're going to do a hatchet job on someone, at least
wait until his door is open]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR2005111101833_pf.html


||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

MORE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE PROBLEMS FOUND

CATHERINE KOMP, NEW STANDARD - Nov 10 - Although this was an "off-term"
election year, voting-rights advocates, computer scientists, and
politicians watched the process closely as more districts used
electronic voting machines, which many blame for irregularities during
the 2004 presidential election. Many of those same problems reportedly
occurred again this year, when an estimated 30 percent of voters used
touch-screen voting machines -- technically known as direct recording
electronic systems -- the majority manufactured by the companies
Diebold, Sequoia, and Election Systems & Software.

According to local media reports, officials at a precinct in Fulton
County, Georgia removed three machines after voters said their votes
registered for different candidates. In Roanoke County, Virginia, people
at several precincts reported that their selection for Dmocratic
candidates registered as votes for Rpublicans in both the governor's and
state attorney general race. And in several Ohio precincts, electronic
machine malfunctions and problems getting machines running forced a
number of polling places to open late.

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=2585

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
INVENTION AND THE MEDIA
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Sam Smith

WHENEVER the Review passes along a story about a new invention that
challenges conventional assumptions about how the world is run, it gets
letters from readers challenging our assumptions about what news we pass
along.

One of the pleasures of editing this journal is that its readers are
exceptionally intelligent about a variety of things. For example, I am
particularly careful about what we publish about airplanes because - for
reasons best known by the doyens of media demographics - the Review
seems to attract people well informed on the principles of aerodynamics.
We have also have physicists, chemists, experts on medical imaging,
theologians, accountants and so forth. . .

But part of intelligence is being hospitable to the new, the possibility
that old theories may be wrong, and the understanding that even the best
paradigms can fall into disrepair. The Review tries to deal with this
with a mixture of skepticism with receptivity.

Some of our readers don't like this and we get letters along the lines
of "Oh Sam, you don't really believe that, do you?" The answer is, "No,
I don't believe that, at least not yet, but it sure is interesting."
This strikes me as a more healthy - even intellectual approach - then to
argue that something couldn't possibly work because it never has before.
Remember: the reason we have inventions is because someone thought of
something for the first time.

I admit a bias that dates back to childhood. Too many hours reading
Popular Mechanics and dreaming of the car I was going to have with
folding wings from which I could quickly exit any traffic jam in
America. I don't have that car but I don't for a minute regret having
imagined it.

My father - though by trade a lawyer and businessman - was always
tinkering with the possible. He designed a proto-cruise control for our
car that was installed by a local mechanic and probably kept all of us
in a perpetual state of risk. My older cousin Mitch Hastings invented an
FM car radio and, as a young boy, I would drive around with my father
and Hastings adjusting the wires under the dash as needed. Earlier, my
father had introduced FM stereo broadcasting to Philadelphia. He brought
the first wood chipper and the first round hay baler to the state of
Maine. But I also know that he ruined my mother's vacuum cleaner trying
to remove the air from a silo he made out of black plastic. In my
family you didn't expect everything to work; you just expected to keep
trying.

A story in the NY Times on America's loss of inventiveness begins this
way:

"When James E. West was 8 years old, he propped himself on his bed's
brass footboard one afternoon and stretched to plug the cord of a radio
he had repaired into a ceiling outlet. It was one of his first
experiments. Mr. West's hand sealed to the light socket as 120 volts of
electricity shimmied through his body, freezing him in place until his
brother knocked him from the footboard and onto the floor. Like more
storied inventors who preceded him, he was quickly hooked on the juice -
even as he lay shivering from that first encounter. . . Over the past
several decades, he has secured 50 domestic and more than 200 foreign
patents on inventions relating to his pioneering explorations of
electrically charged materials and recording devices. According to the
National Inventors Hall of Fame, an organization in Akron, Ohio, that
counts Mr. West among its inductees, about 90 percent of all microphones
used today in devices like cell phones, acoustic equipment and toys
derive from electronic transducers that he helped to develop in the
early 1960's."

We live in a time that treasures rationalism, logic, and the assumption
that if we follow the assigned order of things in the assigned way,
everything will work out. In fact, that isn't the way life works at all.
Some of the best things in life come through serendipity, a taste for
repeated failure, and a refusal to believe what everyone else does.

This is where inventors come from. They often don't get the best grades
because they have so little inclination to follow the rules. They just
come up with the some of the best ideas.

So when the Review runs an article about a possible new source of energy
and it get letters accusing the inventors of being con men, it doesn't
surprise me to read in the Times that America is losing its inventive
edge. We can't all be inventors, but we can, however, at least be nice
to them.

For example, the Review got this sort of derogatory mail after running a
piece about a Harvard doctor's proposed new energy source. It was not
the idea itself that had caught our eye, but the fact that the story had
been written by the science editor of the high respectable Guardian, and
that it reported two public utilities and a Wall Street firm both
interested in the project. If we were being conned we were in some
interesting company.

This is the sort of story that most American media ignore because they
don't want to be accused of having been misled.

But the Review doesn't mind being wrong because if it were as perfect as
much of American journalism pretends to be it would not only be, in
truth, much more wrong, it would also be conning the reader. We only
claim that our average is pretty damn good.

The search for truth, like the search for a new energy source, is an
imperfect business. In both cases, this journal can only bring you news
only of that search. The final answer will have to wait for now


||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RECOVERED HISTORY
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

NOVEMBER 13, 1922 - The Supreme Court rules on the Ozawa case,
definitively prohibiting Japanese from becoming naturalized citizens on
the basis of race. This ban lasted until 1952. A similar case involving
the denial of naturalization was also ruled upon. The Ozawa decision
says members of certain ethnic groups are not entitled to naturalized
citizenship since they are clearly "not Caucasian." Takao Ozawa's
citizenship application was denied in 1914. He arrived in the US in
1894, graduated from a Berkeley high school, and attended the University
of California for three years. Moved to Hawaii and worked for an
American company, attended an American church and sent his children to
American schools.

http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/calmast.htm

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ECOLOGY
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

WHY NO HEALTH WARNINGS ON CARS?

ANDREW SIMMS, RESURGENCE - In the century since the first recorded fatal
traffic accident, the car has claimed 30 million lives. Traffic
accidents are now predicted by the International Federation of Red Cross
and Red Crescent Societies to become the world's third most significant
cause of death and disability by 2020. The World Health Organization
estimates that 1.2 million people die on roads each year: similar to
total fatalities caused by malaria. . .

The car has not simply stumbled into its current iconic and dominant
status. History's biggest red carpet has been rolled out for it. Like a
spoilt young prince it was born and brought up with an economic silver
spoon in its mouth. Margaret Thatcher, as prime minister when I was
growing up, told us we were living in a "great car economy." Roads and
car parks were built for it at public expense. Competition, like the
railways and trams, had already been deliberately run down in its
favour. . .

In the 1920s most significant towns and cities in the United States had
their own electric rail systems: the famous streetcar. There were 1,200
separate systems with 44,000 miles of track. The car company General
Motors made a loss in 1921 and feared that the car market had hit a
wall. Its answer was to target the street and urban railways with a
range of strategies to put them out of business and increase the market
for automobiles. A special unit was set up within the company and it was
disturbingly successful. Former US Senate Counsel Bradford Snell writes:
"GM admitted, in court documents, that by the mid-1950s, its agents had
canvassed more than 1,000 electric railways and that, of these, they had
motorized ninety per cent.". . .

In 1950 there were an estimated 70 million cars, trucks and buses on the
world's roads. Towards the end of the century there were between 600 and
700 million. By 2025 the figure is expected to pass one billion.

But the distribution of vehicle ownership is, and will continue to be,
highly unequal around the world. In the middle of the 1990s, for every
1,000 people in the United States there were 750 motor vehicles. In
China, for the equivalent number of people there were eight vehicles; in
India, seven. Even by the year 2050 with the expected huge growth of car
ownership in the majority world, rich countries with only 16 percent of
the world population will still account for 60 percent of global motor
vehicle emissions. Our use of, and dependence on, the private motor car
is the badge of membership of the ecological debtors' club. . . .

Change, and an end to ecological debt, demands that we "untell" the
stories told every day on behalf of the car in a thousand newspaper and
magazine adverts. These advertisements are, for the car industry, the
equivalent in propaganda to Stalin's state propaganda posters, newsreels
and artwork of happy smiling workers. They hide a brutal reality and a
naked, dissolute emperor.

[Adapted from Andrew Simms' new book "Ecological Debt: The Health of the
Planet and the Wealth of Nations" (Pluto Press, 2005). Andrew Simms is
policy director of the New Economics Foundation]

http://www.alternet.org/story/27948/

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

TELECOMMUTERS OUTNUMBER TRANSIT RIDERS IN 27 METRO AREAS

ADRIAN MOORE, REASON FOUNDATION - Technology is doing something transit
planners have been unable to do for decades - get people out of their
cars. People working from home now outnumber mass transit commuters in
27 of the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas. Telecommuting may be
the most cost effective way to reduce rush-hour traffic and it can even
improve how a weary nation copes with disasters, from hurricanes to
terrorist attacks. It helps improve air quality, highway safety, and
even health care as new technology allows top-notch physicians to be
(virtually) anywhere.

Telecommuting expands opportunities for the handicapped, conserves
energy, and-when used as a substitute for offshore outsourcing-it can
help allay globalization fears. It can even make companies more
profitable, which is good news for our nation's managers, many of whom
have long been suspicious of telecommuting.

Other than driving alone, telecommuting is the only commute mode to gain
market share since 1980. The Census Bureau notes that from 1990 to 2000
the number of those who usually worked at home grew by 23 percent, more
than twice the rate of growth of the total labor market. Since 2000,
telecommuting has continued to grow in popularity. Roughly 4.5 million
Americans telecommute most work days, roughly 20 million telecommute for
some period at least once per month, and nearly 45 million telecommute
at least once per year. . .

Although they effectively receive no public subsidies, telecommuters
actually outnumber transit commuters in a majority (27 out of 50) of
major metropolitan areas (those with populations over 1 million).
Telecommuters outnumber transit commuters in places like San Diego,
Dallas, and Phoenix. They outnumber transit commuters by more than two
to one in places like Raleigh-Durham, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and
Nashville. In Oklahoma City telecommuters outnumber transit commuters by
nearly five to one."

http://www.planetizen.com/node/17968