"What's Going On?" A Vietnam-Era Song Rings True Today

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted December 28, 2006.

Marvin Gaye's 1971 song spoke of the madness of the Vietnam War. His timely lyrics should prompt us to work to end today's senseless war in Iraq.

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In 1971, singer Marvin Gaye raised hackles when he tried to make sense of the madness of the Vietnam War by asking, "What's Going On?" He sang:

Mother, mother/ There's too many of you crying/ Brother, brother, brother/ There's far too many of you dying/ You know we've got to find a way/ To bring some lovin' here today -- Ya/ Father, father/ We don't need to escalate/ You see, war is not the answer/ For only love can conquer hate/ You know we've got to find a way/ To bring some loving' here today.

The song, told from the perspective of a returning Vietnam veteran, was inspired by Gaye's brother who had recently returned from that disastrous war.

Gaye would be asking the same question if he were alive today. Nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. A brutal civil war continues to escalate, aggravated by intense opposition to the U.S. occupation. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, General John Abazaid -- commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East who just resigned -- and the vast majority of the American people oppose sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. Yet George W. Bush is planning to do just that.

Even staunch Republicans like MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, who supported the war and voted twice for Bush, is asking what's going on. On his December 20 show, Scarborough was appalled by Bush's statement, "I encourage you all to go shopping more." MSNBC analyst Mike Barnacle noted that "this President is isolated, delusional, and stubborn." Bush's "delusion," according to Barnacle, is going to result in the deaths and carnage of our troops and people throughout the Middle East. "I don't think [Bush] knows what he's saying . . . He is totally isolated from reality," Barnacle added. "The deaths of American soldiers now verges on the criminal."

So what is going on? Former Nixon counsel John Dean recently told a San Diego audience he doesn't think Bush is in charge -- Cheney is running the government. "One of Dick Cheney's geniuses is that he lets Dubya wake up every morning and think he's President," Dean noted. Cheney has set up his own National Security Council in the Vice President's office, according to Dean. Decisions about budgets, personnel, etc., never get to the Oval Office. Cheney decides the important matters before they ever reach Bush's desk, Dean said.

The report of the Iraq Study Group was not prepared by a bunch of radicals. It even recommended privatizing Iraq's oil. But the group of 10 saw that more troops and shunning Iran and Syria is not the answer. What did Bush do? He dismissed the ISG report out of hand in favor of Cheney's agenda.

Why would Dick Cheney and the neocons who convinced Bush to start this war decide to pull out now? They created the war to achieve their imperial dream of privatizing Iraqi oilfields and building permanent U.S. military bases nearby to protect them. They are willing to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers and the Iraqi people in pursuit of their dream.

Cheney is undoubtedly telling the evangelical Dubya to hang in there, God is testing him. Remember Bush said he consulted with his heavenly father before starting the war. If Bush thinks God told him to start this war, what will it take to make him stop?

And it could get worse. Cheney-Bush has sent our battleships to the Persian Gulf to "warn" Iran that we mean business. And the White House blacked out parts of a New York Times op-ed on negotiating with Iran written by two former U.S. government advisors. This means, in all likelihood, that Cheney has decided it's time to pick off the next member of the Axis of Evil. They're following the same strategy they used on the way to Iraq: convince the American people that Iran is building weapons of mass destruction, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Attacking Iran would cause a disaster of epic proportions.

Now that the Democrats are taking over the reins in Washington, we have a golden opportunity to set things right. But incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid's first instinct was to align himself with the 12 percent of Americans who support sending more troops to Iraq. And new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lost no time in declaring that they would not cut funding for the war.

It seems more likely the Republicans, not the Democrats, will try to derail the Cheney-Bush war express. Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore) declared last week on the Senate floor: "I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore."

Ultimately, it is up to the American people to step up to the plate and stop this war. It's fine to tell the pollsters we want our troops out of Iraq. But that's not doing the trick. The Vietnam War ended after thousands of people marched in the streets. We may not have the draft to get the college kids off their duffs. But we do have our consciences. And that should be enough.

Tagged as: war in iraq, bush

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published next spring by PoliPointPress.

Hope for New Orleans

By William H. Chafe
The Washington Post

Wednesday 27 December 2006

Nearly 16 months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains devastated. In the Lower Ninth Ward (primarily black and poor), mid-city (mixed-race and middle class) and Lakeside (richer and whiter), houses are boarded up and ruined; shattered windows reveal rooms full of debris; perhaps one in 10 places has a FEMA trailer parked outside, as a few returning residents desperately try to reclaim what they have lost. Thousands of small businesses have disappeared. Even in the French Quarter, which was left largely intact after Katrina, shopkeepers despair of being able to survive given the decline in tourism. Repeatedly, people declare: "I have not received a single dollar of federal aid."

Yet in this season that celebrates the birth of a child in what today would be called a homeless shelter, a remarkable resiliency of spirit remains in New Orleans. Yes, only half the population there in August 2005 has returned. The suicide rate has increased 300 percent, and less than half of the schools and hospitals that existed 16 months ago are functioning.

But energy, engagement and love persist, creating tiny ripples of hope, from thousands of individual acts of courage - ripples that can, in words Robert Kennedy uttered 40 years ago in South Africa, "build a current" able to topple the mightiest walls of oppression.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, more than a hundred volunteers gather in a Catholic school (St. Mary of the Angels) to help secure - with the community - a foothold toward starting anew. Some are college students, others grandparents and hippies. All have come to live and work with local residents. Most spend their days gutting houses so that returning residents can be eligible for federal rebuilding funds. Tearing down sheetrock infested with toxic mold is dangerous work. Others toil in the kitchen, helping members of the "Rainbow Tribe" - a commune - prepare Brunswick stew, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken for 150.

No one sees this as a lark. The unpaid staff briefs workers on the hazards they will face, insisting that respirators fit snugly so that no toxins are inhaled. The kitchen crew tests every dish to be sure it has reached a temperature high enough to eliminate any chance of food poisoning. Everyone is deadly serious - and also clearly moved by the importance of the mission. They are white and black, male and female. They respect the integrity and autonomy of the neighbors they are there to help, committed not to fall into old hierarchies of white and black, male and female.

In the civil rights movement, such people called themselves a "beloved community" - people transformed by an ethos of love and justice into becoming soldiers for justice. If redemption can follow tragedy in New Orleans, these volunteers - in partnership with community residents - will be the ones to make it happen.

But the signs of hope are not just in the courage of people in the Ninth Ward. They are there as well in the celebration of community among those less afflicted by poverty, people who have come back to New Orleans out of love for their city in order to make it the kind of place they want their children to grow up in. They have their own rituals.

On a Sunday, in a small bar, 30 neighborhood residents gather for a weekly get-together. White and black, gay and straight, old and young, they listen to their favorite jazz quartet and vocalist. They hug, laugh, cheer. They welcome strangers in their midst, anxious to talk about what they've been through. A father dances with his young daughter. The cook mingles with those eating from the buffet she's prepared, embracing her friends. In its own way this, too, is a "beloved community" - people sustained by a history of caring about each other and about something in New Orleans that has made their spirits fresh and engaged.

From one perspective, the future of New Orleans is bleak. Surely no governmental body, least of all FEMA, has given anyone reason for confidence. But this is no ordinary place, and these are no ordinary people. Rooted in their history is a vision - admittedly utopian - that affirms the possibilities of living in biracial peace; prizes grace, hospitality and humor; and fights like hell against bureaucrats who refuse to acknowledge the human potential for rising above self-interest and cynicism. Maybe - just maybe - there is reason to hope.

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William H. Chafe, a history professor at Duke University, writes about race and gender. He recently returned from a weekend as a volunteer in New Orleans.

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Memorization, Standardized Tests, and Official Policy

By Jack Blatherwick, PhD
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Thursday 28 December 2006

Teaching answers to standardized tests should not be called "education," especially when problem-solving will be the most important tool for a generation of students destined to inherit the incredible problems we will leave as our legacy.

To repeat the answers we feed is at best, preparing future "patriots" for greater acceptance of official policy. The consequences of this blind trust have become painfully apparent. Our government spent millions of dollars on propaganda to sell a peace-loving populace on an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.

Of all the multiple-choice reasons for this invasion, the one remaining is that Iraq sits in a strategic position for our military to control Asian oil. Imagine the mark this answer would have received on a government-generated standardized test.

In our name, and with our unwitting approval, the United States has aggressively squandered a peace that was earned by the blood of generations before us. We the People unknowingly "agreed to" torture of prisoners, non-compliance with international treaties, destruction of the environment, and proliferation of a nuclear arsenal that was already excessive for its insane, outdated, imaginary purpose. We've widened the gap between the wealthy and the less-fortunate; denied affordable access to health care, and - to avoid any sacrifice - we've left our children with the tab.

We acquiesced, because to dissent would have been unpatriotic, non-supportive of the troops, and part of a far-left agenda. Standardized tests have just as little room for dissent, and might be the perfect preparation for naive acceptance of creeping fascism. After all, many neo-conservative leaders believe THE problem in our country is a lack of patriotic indoctrination at the elementary levels of public education.

Rote memorization of answers to tests will not prepare anyone for this mess we leave. Furthermore, it defies logic to insist that our answers are the ones that should be memorized. Many of our answers have been abject failures, and those of our government have been criminal.

Better we teach our children no answers - only questions and suspicions, courage and insight to detect official ideology. They will need wisdom beyond ours to rebuild our trusted position of leadership in a peaceful world - to restore environmental health to a wounded planet - and to redefine concepts like patriotism, democracy, and morality.

They will need an extraordinary education, not short answers. Testing and retesting is no substitute for investment in education. We wouldn't consider cutting the budgets of failing governmental services that affect our own quality of life. If the military needs more money, it is appropriated, as it would be for police, fire, or highway departments if we thought their product was substandard. But, if irrelevant tests suggest that schools are struggling, our solution is to cut funding, rather than to give them what they need.

Will our generation be remembered as the most self-centered in history? Or will we recognize the problems we've created and leave the one thing we can - a quality education? Our ancestors sacrificed proudly to provide for us - with hammer and saw, they built the best schools in the world.

We, as custodians of this tradition, might even have to raise taxes to pass our own final examination.

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Jack Blatherwick has been a physiologist and teacher for 40 years.

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Reality Strikes Back, but Let's Not Have too Much Realism

Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian UK

Thursday 28 December 2006

In the coming year, we should not abandon all idealism along with the dangerous illusions of the Bush era.

In world politics, 2007 may be the year of realism. If that means getting rid of dangerous illusions, it's a good thing. If it means abandoning idealism, it's a bad thing. In the way of things, it will probably mean some of both. Back in 2002, a senior adviser to President Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind that people in "the reality-based community" - journalists, for example - had got it seriously wrong. "That's not the way the world really works any more," the adviser said. "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." So, while ignoring the reality-based evidence for global warming, and relying on what wits described as "faith-based intelligence" for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bushies set about transforming the world through a democratic revolution kickstarted by the use of force. The empire struck.

Five years on, the reality has struck back. As we move into 2007, all the talk is of sobering realities - Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change and global economics. This is a positive development. At least we have got our feet back on the ground, even if the ground is hotter than it used to be. On climate change, I see the beginning of a big shift. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, writing in the Economist's World in 2007, puts climate change top of his list of global challenges. "Global warming is a reality and portends a dire future for us all, should insufficient action be taken," says John McCain, the leading Republican contender to succeed Bush as president. Insufficient action will be taken in 2007, you can be sure of that, but at least the reality is no longer denied.

A similar realism can be seen in relation to the Middle East. Even Bush is no longer pretending that "we're winning" in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group (ISG) has reaffirmed the centrality of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to the future of the west's relations with the Arab and Muslim world. Even if the Bush administration is not prepared to talk directly to Iran and Syria, the idea of crusading against an ostracised "axis of evil" is comprehensively discredited. Of the three alleged members of that axis, Iraq is now more of a recruiting ground for terrorists than it was five years ago, North Korea has nuclear weapons and Iran is stronger than ever. So much for a faith-based foreign policy.

Unfortunately, this new realism comes packaged with an older realism, or realpolitik - an approach, last seen in the administration of Bush Sr, which insists you must take your allies where you find them and not worry too much about the way they treat their subjects. The national interest, and the west's economic and security interests, justify good relations with friendly autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. James Baker, co-chair of the ISG, and Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to Bush Sr, are leading representatives of this approach. Although Bush Jr is resisting this return of the father, the trend in Washington is clearly from Bush II back towards Bush I.

A country to watch in tracking this trend is Iran. Before the invasion of Iraq, we wanted two things from Iran. First, to slow down, and preferably halt, its nuclear programme. And, second, to speed up the process of domestic political change, leading to more respect for human rights, pluralism and, eventually, democracy. Now we want three things from Tehran: those two plus its help in stabilising Iraq, through its influence with the Shia majority there. Iran is stronger and more hostile, yet we want more from it. There is no way we will get all three at once. So which area will the west go soft on in 2007? I bet it will be human rights and democratisation.

Signs of the new old realism are also to be found in the policy of the west's most articulate serving exponent of idealistic liberal internationalism, Tony Blair. Recently, London rolled out the red carpet for the friendly dictator of Kazakhstan. In southern Iraq, British troops are preparing their withdrawal, leaving something well short of democracy. In Dubai before Christmas, Blair said that in the struggle against terrorism, and facing the threat from Iran, we must strengthen our ties with "moderate", albeit authoritarian, Arab states. Challenged about the authoritarian character of the United Arab Emirates - where, in recent elections to an advisory council, just 1% of citizens were allowed to vote - Blair told the Financial Times: "It's got to move at its own pace, but the direction is very clear."

I'm waiting for someone to pen a new version of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous article of 1979, "Dictatorships and double standards", in which she argued that friendly, anti-Soviet, rightwing autocracies should be treated differently from pro-Soviet, leftwing totalitarian regimes. Double standards? Yes, please. Today, a friendly autocracy will be defined partly by its positioning in the struggle with jihadist terrorism and partly by its readiness to sell its energy and natural resources to the west. Since China is competing for those resources and does not give a damn about the human rights records of its suppliers, our capacity to impose political conditions on our suppliers is correspondingly reduced.

What should this policy be called? Most people have forgotten that Bush Jr came to power in 2001 preaching a "new realism", in contrast to what he pilloried as the unfocused, liberal idealist interventionism of the Clinton years. However, after the 9/11 attacks and especially in his second term, he came to advocate a breathtakingly idealist policy of global democratisation. The American political writer Robert Kagan described Bush's new approach as a "higher realism". So that was the new new realism. Now we have the new new new realism, or new3 realism. If new2 realism had an unrealistically large admixture of idealism, believing that democracy would spread across the Middle East as it had across Eastern Europe after 1989, new3 realism risks swinging back to the opposite extreme, making the old mistake of believing that a durable order can be built on friendly autocracies. So let us indeed have a reality-based international community in 2007, but let's not have too much realism. In the long run, nothing could be less realistic.

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Throw the Bums Out and Change Direction

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted December 28, 2006.

The voters had their way: Now there are reasons to be cheerful -- and vigilant -- about a Democratic Congress.

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At an October fundraiser in Topeka, the Republican faithful lined up to shake hands with the headliner, Dick Cheney. But before getting to the Veep, they had to get past the wife of the local Congress critter. She was standing adjacent to Cheney, holding a big bottle of Purell, a hand sanitizer that claims to kill "99.99% of most common germs." Each person waiting to get their grip-and-grin with the honoree first had to accept a squirt of the goop from this lady to purify their hands! After the meet-and-greet was over, Cheney ducked backstage and rubbed a generous dollop of the antiseptic onto his own hands, cleansing him of the human contact he had just endured.

On November 7, however, it was voters doing the cleansing, washing their hands of the Bush-Cheney regime. Yes, I know that Bush & Gang are still there, and they'll be trying to do all the damage they can in their remaining two years. But by losing the House and Senate majority, they have hit a serious speed bump.

Toward the end of the campaign, the White House insisted that Republicans would retain control of Congress because voters were focused on local issues and candidates, not on Bush or his policies. "We have succeeded in making these races choices between two local candidates," bragged Karl Rove. And when a reporter suggested that Bush's disastrous war in Iraq was dragging down GOP congressional candidates, Cheney chimed in with his two cents' worth of political insight: "We're not running for office."

Wrong, Karl. Wrong, Dick. In its exit polls, The New York Times found that Bush's war, Bush's economy, and Bush himself were foremost on voters' minds as they entered the voting booths to toss out the Republican Congress.

68 percent said that the Iraq war was either "very" important or "extremely" important in how they voted (only 10 percent said it was "not at all" important).

83 percent said the economy was very or extremely important in how they voted (and 68 percent said that their family was either falling behind financially or barely staying even).

In fact, George has become so unpopular that only the GOP candidates in the reddest of red spots asked him to campaign with them. The cruelest blow came on the campaign's last day. Bush was to appear in Pensacola, Florida, at a Republican rally featuring the party's gubernatorial hopeful, Charlie Crist. Ten thousand partisans turned out for Bushbut one person who decided at the last minute not to come was…Charlie. Seeing Bush's poll numbers in Florida below 40 percent, Charlie suddenly remembered that he needed to be over in Palm Beach that day. Jilted, poor George had to call in Brother Jeb to do the introduction.

Spin it as they will, this election was a resounding rejection of the Bushites' agenda. As an independent voter in New Jersey said as she headed into her polling place, "I don't care if I vote for Happy the Clown, just so it's not who's there now." She added that she was voting "against the powers that put us in this situation" in Iraq.

Progressive surge

The establishment media pundits, clueless as ever, have tried their damndest to contort the Democratic sweep into a victory for conservatives! They claim that the Dems who won in red areas were victorious only because they adopted Republican-like positions on guns, abortion, or religion.

Your average rutabaga has a sharper analytical ability than that. If these pundits would venture out and talk with anyone besides themselves, they'd find that people aren't one-dimensional stick figures. Being a hunter and a defender of gun rights in a so-called red state, for example, doesn't turn you into Dick Cheney.

Take Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana. He's a big burly guy, with the boots, belly, and buzzcut that makes him appear to be a rural conservative caricature. To add to the stereotype, he's pro-gun and antigay marriage.

But let's fill in this stickman drawing of Tester. He's an organic farmer. He took time off in the heat of the campaign to go home to harvest his crops. He's a working guy who's missing three fingers from a tangle he had with a meat grinder. He's been a teacher, soil-conservation leader, and president of the state senate (where he established a solidly progressive record of siding with common folks against the corporate interests).

Jon defeated three-term incumbent and corporate favorite Conrad Burns by running a flatout populist campaign that took these stands: raise the minimum wage to a livable level, provide health care for all, fight the drug giants for lower prescription prices, stop big interests from selling off or locking up our public lands, halt the use of the Patriot Act to invade the lives of innocent Americans, oppose NAFTA-like trade scams, ban lobbyist-paid gifts and travel, make college affordable, promote renewable energy and conservation, save Social Security from the privatizers, battle railroad monopolies that hold rural communities captive, focus tax relief on the middle class instead of on millionaires, and--a big one--give military control of Iraq to the Iraqis, bring our troops home, and fully fund veterans' health care.

Conservative? On the kitchentable issues that matter to people (issues that require a political leader to side with ordinary folks against the corporate and governmental elites), Jon Tester is the kind of populist progressive that America needs.

The good news is that voters not only took out Bush's rubber- stamp congressional majority, but they also brought in a crop of real progressives who'll add badly needed energy and more of an "outsider" attitude to what has been a lackluster, tired, corporate-coddling Democratic party. In addition to Tester, the Senate will feel the progressive surge that will come from Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bernie Sanders (Vermont)--all of whom ran campaigns centered on economic populism.

Likewise, the House majority will be invigorated by a new class of Democrats who campaigned on a core progressive agenda, including minimum wage, health care, Social Security, and Bush's Iraq war. Meet a few of them.

Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire is a teacher, social worker, and staunch war opponent. Short on money but strong in volunteer support, she had to battle her own party's establishment to win the nomination. Then her shoe-leather, issue-oriented, no-nonsense, populist approach upset the GOP's entrenched incumbent, making her the first New Hampshire woman in history to go to Congress.

Tim Walz is a high-school teacher, football coach, 24-year member of the Army National Guard…and passionate defender of liberty and justice for all. In 2004, he escorted two of his students to a Bush rally in his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota. At the checkpoint, however, George W's security thugs barred them from entering because one of the students had a Kerry-Edwards sticker on his wallet. "This is not how America is supposed to be," Tim said. So he has now paid Bush back by running a populist campaign that upset a six-term incumbent who was a Bush apologist and servant of special interests. John Hall is a rock musician (founder of the band Orleans) and longtime environmental activist who lives in New York's Hudson Valley. In 2004 the Bushites lifted one of his tunes, "Still the One," as their presidential campaign song, not bothering to get permission. Hall protested their thievery and forced them to stop. This year -- with the enthusiastic backing of labor, environmental, and antiwar groups -- John lifted the Republican incumbent from Congress.

Jerry McNerney is a California alternative-energy entrepreneur, an engineer … and now a giant killer. With strong grassroots support from environmentalists and other progressives, McNerney had a stunning victory over Richard Pombo, the arrogant, corporate-hugging, antigovernment absolutist who was chair of the natural resources committee.

Vigorous antiestablishment campaigns like these have brought renewed progressive strength to Washington. More importantly, though, this year's campaigns have greatly strengthened our grassroots power, even in areas where our candidates didn't make it. We've added more and better-trained campaign activists, gained experience, spread the populist message where it has long been unheard, attracted new voters (including many who had dropped out or had considered themselves conservative), and created frameworks to sustain a continuing movement.

Seizing the initiative

While this was a "throw the bums out" year, it was just as clearly a "change America's direction" year, with the majority finally rising up to throw off the rightwing plutocracy, autocracy, theocracy, and kleptocracy that Bush & Company have hung around America's neck.

One sign of this fed-up sentiment was the total repudiation of a bit of corporate-backed ugliness called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Known as TABOR, it's more like a Bill of Wrongs, for it's essentially another ploy by the antitax, hate-government elites to defund even essential public services from education to public safety. It's the creature of the ultranutty Grover Norquist and receives its main financing from a multimillionaire New York developer named (you won't believe this!) Howie Rich.

TABOR was put forth as ballot initiatives in nine states this year, but six states stripped it from their ballots because of fraud and assorted wrongdoings by the initiative's pusher.Then, by convincing margins, the voters of Maine, Nebraska, and Oregon said no to TABOR's ideological malevolence.

Meanwhile, there was widespread positive news on the initiative front. The most resounding victories came in all six states which had initiatives to increase the minimum wage. Voters said "yes" in Arizona (66 percent approval), Colorado (53 percent), Missouri (76 percent), Montana (73 percent), Nevada (69 percent), and Ohio (56 percent). In all the states but Nevada, the initiatives also required that the minimum wage be adjusted annually for inflation. Voters in Arizona and Nebraska (supposedly antitax, bright-red states) approved initiatives to increase funding for early childhood education. Washington State voted to require that big utilities produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Oregon expanded access to a prescriptiondrug program for the uninsured, and Missouri okayed funding for stemcell research.

Secretaries of state

Amazingly, America still can't seem to get this democracy thing down. People are actively discouraged from voting, and votes aren't counted as the voter intended. There were no total meltdowns this year (à la Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004), but serious problems persisted. Outrageous electronic voting "glitches," disgraceful voter intimidation and suppression, and crass purges of voter rolls continue to be a plague on our country's democratic pretensions.

Some of the problems turned comical. In Ohio, Republican Congress critter Steve Chabot was turned away from voting because the address on his ID differed from the one on his registration card; the top election official in Missouri was asked three times to show a photo ID in order to vote, even though state law does not require one; and Gov. Mark Sanford was sent away from his South Carolina polling place because he showed up without his registration card.

Then there's the ghost of Katherine Harris. As Florida's secretary of state in 2000, she infamously rigged the vote count for George W. She then went to Congress, and this year she ran for (and lost) a U.S. Senate seat. But her bad mojo reached out and touched the election to replace her in the House. Touch-screen voting machines which she had championed as secretary of state appear to have malfunctioned on November 7 in her old congressional district, erasing the votes of some 18,000 people. Only 373 votes separated the two candidates, so a recount is underway. However, since there's no paper trail to these machines, it'll be hard to prove that all those people didn't just fail to vote in this particular race. This sort of ridiculous stuff is why the little-known office of the secretary of state is key to getting a grip on our democracy -- and why progressives ran for these offices in seven states this fall, winning in Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. In Minnesota, my old friend Mark Ritchie ousted an eight-year incumbent who had turned the office into an electioneering wing of the Republican party. Crisscrossing the state, Mark tapped into a deep well of anger about the lack of fairness and integrity in the voting system and will now do the work needed to restore people's faith.

What now?

On the plus side, some good people are going to be in positions to do good things in Congress. Speaker-tobe Nancy Pelosi has come out with a "First Hundred Hours" agenda that ranges from passing a new minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to breaking the corruption ties between lobbyists and legislation. And nearly everyone except "Slow Joe" Lieberman seems to realize that Bush's war is wrong and we must get out of it--pronto.

Also, there are some promising changes in who runs Congress's committees, such as John Conyers (Judiciary), David Obey (Appropriations), George Miller (Education and the Workforce), Henry Waxman (Government Reform), Nydia Velázquez (Small Business), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Bob Filner (Veterans' Affairs), and Charlie Rangel (Ways and Means).

On the down side, there are still too many go-slow, don't-rock-theboat, weak-kneed, money-grubbing, corporatized Democrats who won't break their habits of bedding down with the lobbyists and even the Bushites. They will push hard from inside the Democratic Caucus (while the White House, the money interests and the establishment media pushes from outside) for the majority to "be nice," move to the corporate right, and agree from the start to surrender half of what they want (and then compromise down from there).

Now is the time for progressives to be more vigilant than ever -- focus on what the Democrats are doing and not doing, make loud and clear demands that they do more, and keep organizing at the grassroots level. Just a few months ago, George W. declared, "I'm the decider." No, he's not. Neither are the Democrats. You are.

Tagged as: elections, voting, election06

From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, December 2006. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time to Take It Back."

Impeachment: A Note of Caution

By Joel Wendland
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Saturday 30 December 2006

The impeachment of President Bush has become an important issue. For some people on the left, impeachment has even become a litmus test for the "true" progressive.

For example, I recently received an e-mail from a reader who apparently holds such a viewpoint. (I won't bait the person by naming him or her, but he or she claimed ties to the Democratic Party machine in Minnesota.) This person responded to an article I wrote about a public forum in Detroit at which Representative John Conyers (D-Minn.) spoke about a "people's agenda" for the new Congress.

In my article, I reported that Conyers said, among many things, that while his committee and the Democrats would hold numerous hearings on Bush's policies (from the war to corruption and attacks on civil liberties), he regards introducing articles of impeachment as off-agenda when Congress returns in January. Conyers urged the people present to help Congress expose the truth about Bush, and said that in order for impeachment to be successful it must have broader public support and bipartisanship in Congress.

In the response, the angry reader appeared to unabashedly label Conyers as a party "hack," along with other Democrats, for trying to "spin and twist" the results of the election - which were based, in the reader's view, on a popular demand for impeachment. The reader cited one speech by a retired local Michigan politician (whom he mistook for a Republican loyalist) as evidence for this claim. This attack on Conyers was surprising, needless to say, given the future House Judiciary Committee chair's long commitment to the struggle for peace, civil and workers' rights, and social justice - much longer than Bush's soon-to-end political career, and certainly longer than just about any of Conyers' critics.

What the reader's abusive remarks ignored is that while polls show that voters soundly rebuffed Bush's war policy and Republican corruption, and are seriously concerned about the administration's handling of the economy and many social issues, the movement for impeachment has yet to be effectively built. Simple as that.

Building a credible movement for impeachment is the subject of a book edited by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips called "Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney." Its contributors move beyond name-calling and targeting of people like Representative Conyers out of otherwise well-intentioned anger.

"Impeach the President" enlists the pen of the great agitator Howard Zinn, as well as widely published journalists, academics, and activists such as Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller. This book documents a range of policy and ideological positions adopted by the Bush administration and the Republican Party that cost lives, destroyed countries and cities, and may have an enduring negative impact on the globe and all human life. From Iraq to New Orleans; ignoring global warming to protecting fossil fuels; and rejecting international law and the U.S. Constitution, the Bush administration and its Republican Party allies in the outgoing Congress are responsible for some of the greatest crimes of the 21st century.

In Iraq, for example, journalist Dahr Jamal exposes a hidden story of that war. Talking to people who witnessed the infamous battle at Fallujah in November 2004, Jamal documents atrocities ordered on that city by US military commanders. He ties the transformation of Iraq into a "free fire zone" to torture and brutality committed in US controlled prisons in Iraq, and to the failure of the occupation forces to rebuild the country after Bush's premature declaration of victory in May 2003.

Greg Palast discusses the infamous Downing Street memo [which this website was among the first U.S.-based publications to reproduce], a secret British government document released to the British press in the spring of 2005. This memo indicates that British officials knew that the Bush administration's reasons for pushing for war with Iraq could not be substantiated. The memo, authored in July 2002, also shows that despite the Bush administration's public claim to desire a diplomatic resolution to the crisis it had instigated with Iraq, British advisers had reason to believe that the administration intended to go to war regardless, as early as the spring 2002. This was months before the massive public-relations effort by the Bush administration that threatened the populace with Iraq's imaginary WMD and the imminence of Iraq's threat. Indeed, the author of the memo believed that, as part of the PR push, the Bush administration had "fixed" intelligence to support their justifications for the war. Related documents extending the war plan timeline even further back - to the opening months of 2002 - were later leaked to the press.

Palast contrasts the swift impeachment of former President Bill Clinton over lying about his sexual activities with the former Republican-controlled Congress's refusal to even hold a substantive hearing on the Downing Street memo and its implications.

While this book addresses a number of things that could be considered impeachable - lying in order to start a war, ordering military personnel to break international and US law by torturing people, breaking US law to conduct illegal surveillance on people in the US - its chapters on "Ignoring Peak Oil," "Propaganda, Lies, and Patriotic Jingoism," and "Bush-Cheney's War on the Enlightenment" are more about ideology and policies. This shift in focus confuses and may even undermine the immediate intention of the book.

Impeachment, of course, is a legalistic approach to addressing the crimes of a federal official such as the president or members of his administration. A movement that aims to pressure Congress to impeach Bush should focus on actual impeachable acts that would be considered "high crimes and misdemeanors." By contrast, human-rights lawyer Elizabeth De La Vega's book, "United States v. Bush et al," scrutinizes some specific legal issues more directly and lays out an actual indictment that might be presented to a constitutionally mandated entity.

Impeachment is not the real point of the Loo/Phillips book, in my opinion. Impeachment is a limited recourse which, while it is a worthy goal that should be pursued against Bush et al initially by truth-seeking investigations in Congress, it will, if successful, produce little more than censure for its targets. Even further, I suspect that most voters believe they held Bush and the Republicans accountable for bad policies and heinous actions by "firing" congressional Republicans last month.

The real aim of this book is to help generate a more substantial, long-term change. And that is to build a democratic culture willing and capable of holding elected officials and government institutions accountable for their decisions, ensuring that the people have a recourse against those who abuse their power. An effectively used legal remedy to punish criminal acts such as impeachment would have a stronger deterrent effect on future officials from committing similar acts. More specifically, the goal should be to examine and bring to light the true causes, rationale, and motives for war, expansion, military aggression, and, ultimately, empire.

The book sums up a lot of different issues that anger millions of people. But as Howard Zinn notes in his introduction to the book, Republicans and Democrats in Congress should not be expected to take the lead to impeach Bush. Indeed, such a notion undermines the basis of a democratic culture of accountability and decisively defeating and splitting the corporate, religious, and political coalition that supports Bush and the Republican Party.

To add my two cents, I believe that the explicit demand to impeach Bush and Cheney is jumping the gun. We can already see that the slogan's effects are divisive and limited, sparking the anger of the righteously committed aimed at Democratic members of Congress who feel forced to retreat on "going after Bush," and shifting focus away from the people who committed the crimes.

The impeachment movement should really be a truth movement. It should be something akin to the "truth and reconciliation" process in post-apartheid South Africa, during which appropriate punishments were handed down to criminals exposed for heinous crimes against humanity, while preserving the unity of all the people by not allowing the process to be turned into a witch hunt.

With the slogan, "We Need to Know the Truth," a broad people's movement can pressure the new Congress to put on the public record the truth about the Downing Street memo (and similar evidence of misleading the public and Congress into war) and what the Bush people knew and when they knew it. Investigations should scrutinize the role of corporations tied to the White House in keeping the war in Iraq rolling along. Investigations should examine the issue of torture and violations of international and US law, the so-called imperial presidency, and the abuse of civil liberties.

Many congressional investigations of these matters have been planned. The truth movement should be closely following these investigations, demanding more, and pushing further for full accountability. But calling allies to the truth movement like Representative Conyers a "hack" because he won't step out into the wilderness of Congress alone is simply little more than a divisive and empty gesture. To be sure, punishing the Bush cabal for its crimes abroad and at home will require the broadest public support - not just charged rhetoric by principled people.

The most immediate changes that need to be won for working families by the new Congress are raising the minimum wage, reforming the health-care farce we call a "system," protecting our voting rights, guaranteeing the right of workers to join unions, taking substantive steps to address environmental catastrophes bearing down on us, and protecting civil rights and liberties. These changes, which will have an immediately meaningful impact on the lives of millions of people, should happen before Congress is ground to a halt with an impeachment struggle.

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Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

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US Death Toll in Iraq Seen Spurring Anti-War Protests

By Carey Gillam
Reuters

Thursday 28 December 2006

Kansas City, Missouri - In Kansas City, they will light candles and lay out more than 80 pairs of empty combat boots. In Chicago, anti-war activists will hand out black ribbons, each bearing the name of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

And in New Haven, Connecticut, opponents of the war plan to read aloud the names of 3,000 dead U.S. soldiers.

In all, organizers say some 140 demonstrations in 37 states are planned to mark the 3,000th U.S. military death in Iraq, a milestone that is likely only days away. By Thursday, some 2,989 U.S. troops had died in Iraq since the start of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the unrelenting violence.

Among those keeping track of the U.S. death toll, including soldiers' families, peace activists, politicians, veterans and others, many say they will commemorate the 3,000 mark as both a way to honor the dead and demand an end to the war.

"This horrific and tragic milestone allows us to remind this country of the daily unending human toll of a war that didn't have to happen," said Nancy Lessin, who co-founded Military Families Speak Out after her stepson was called to serve with the Marines in Iraq.

"When we reach the 3,000 mark, it is 3,000 too many."

Opinion polls show the war has become increasingly unpopular with a U.S. public that initially supported it. Voter discontent was a key factor in Democrats' victory over President George W. Bush's Republican Party in congressional elections last month.

So far, the discontent has not translated into large anti-war demonstrations, with events over the last year attracting sometimes only a handful of activists, up to sometimes a few hundred, at each place. Turnout could be similarly low-key this time.

Military Families, which has 3,100 members, is coordinating in its protests with Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group of veterans and active-duty soldiers, and the American Friends Service Committee, a Philadelphia-based social peace and justice group. Other anti-war groups are also participating.

Along with commemorating U.S. soldiers, many events will also mourn dead Iraqi citizens.

"Each individual death is tragic and meaningful ... but the 3,000 mark is an opportunity to recognize and send a message that more war is only going to create more death," said Kansas City Iraq Task Force co-chair Ira Harritt, who is planning a demonstration showcasing empty boots to represent each Missouri and Kansas soldier who has died in the war.

The groups also plan to mount a fresh effort to try to get Congress to do its part to end the war - calling on the new Democrat-led Congress that convenes next month to refuse to approve more funds for the war.

Mark Graham, an American Friends staffer assigned to monitor the death toll and coordinate U.S. demonstrations, said thousands of people were expected to participate in the protests after the 3,000th death.

"It is a very depressing thing to be looking for ... and really sad," said Graham.

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Pentagon to Request Billions More in War Money

By David S. Cloud
The New York Times

Saturday 30 December 2006

Washington - The Pentagon is seeking nearly $100 billion for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, a request that, if approved by Congress, would set an annual record for war-related spending.

The $99.7 billion request, detailed in a 17-page internal Defense Department memorandum dated Dec. 7, would be in addition to $70 billion appropriated in September. The request would push the total for the 2007 fiscal year to nearly $170 billion, 45 percent more than Congress provided for 2006.

The request is likely to receive more scrutiny from Congress next year than previous supplemental spending bills, in part because Democrats now control both the House and Senate. Another reason for the scrutiny is that Pentagon officials encouraged the services to ask for "costs related to the longer war against terror," not just continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a memorandum that became public earlier this year.

About $50 billion - most of the money - would go to the Army, which is conducting the bulk of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request also includes $3.8 billion for the Air Force and $3 billion for the Navy to buy or upgrade aircraft. Both services have argued in recent months that they need to replace planes used in combat operations.

But some experts questioned whether the services were exploiting the must-pass nature of the supplemental bill to seek money for other purposes like the modernization of aircraft rather than just wartime replacements. Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a policy analysis organization in Virginia, pointed to the Air Force request for $62 million for ballistic missiles, a weapon not being employed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Mr. Thompson said the request, which is not described further in the memorandum, may be part of a continuing Air Force project to arm ballistic missiles with conventional warheads to be able to strike terrorist targets quickly if other weapons cannot be used.

Even so, he added, "there are a number of weapons systems in the supplemental request not normally associated with fighting terrorists but which the services say still should be covered as part of the global effort."

Altogether, the four military services would receive $26.6 billion for "reconstitution," a term that the memorandum said covered repair and replacement of equipment damaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with the $50 billion already provided this year, that is more than double what Congress appropriated in 2006.

"There is a real question about how much of this is really related to the war," said Steve Kosiak, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington policy analysis group.

The Pentagon is also seeking $9.7 billion for training Iraqi and Afghan security forces, almost as much as has been spent in total since 2001, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service. In a reflection of the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, more than half of the requested money would go to training the country's army and police forces.

The request also underscores the continuing strain that deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are putting on ground forces. The request includes $3.7 billion to speed up its outfitting and training of two Army combat brigades and three Marine battalions.

Since 2001, Congress has approved $507 billion for Afghanistan, Iraq and other operations deemed part of combating terrorism. Even with the Democrats in control, there is unlikely to be much appetite for cutting the war-related spending requests, Mr. Kosiak said.

"No one seems to be saying we're going to make deep cuts in war-related expenditures," he said. "I don't see evidence that the Democrats are interested in cutting this."

But the incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees have said they will push the Bush administration to finance war costs in regular appropriations bills, not in supplemental spending measures, to make the costs clearer.

The request also includes $10 billion for protective equipment for troops and $2.5 billion for technology to defeat improvised bombs, the leading cause of American combat casualties in Iraq.

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Here Are the Christians!

By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Friday 29 December 2006

My recent column "Where Are the Christians?" drew a bundle of answers in emails from Truthout readers. That piece was about the bigoted remarks of Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) attacking newly-elected Congressman Keith Ellis, a Muslim, for taking his unofficial oath of office with his hand on the Quran - and mindlessly predicting that this would somehow lead to a vast increase in illegal Muslim immigration (unless, of course, we close our borders).

It might be instructive to quote a couple of the emails I received.

Reverend Joy A. Bergfalk, of Life Listening Resources at Labyrinth House in Rochester, N.Y., wrote, "We progressives ... do not have the finances of the Religious Right. We do not have Big Business and Sun Myung Moon to back us, and the oil industry is certainly not with us. That kind of money goes to those who will let the corporate world take over America. Plus, we tend to try to use our finances to change the world by helping it."

In answer to my "Where Are the Christians?" question, Rev. Bergfalk wrote, "We are almost all of the places where peacemaking is going on. We are at marches and rallies. We are at our computers writing responses, letters to Congress and whomever we can. I have written a response to Goode's statements. There was no way to email it to him from outside of Virginia, so I have prepared a letter to be sent to each of his five offices."

She added, "And we are speaking out in churches and from the pulpits. I think my parishioners now realize that Muslims and Christians worship the same God by different names."

And she closed with, "We may not be as obnoxious and flamboyant as the Religious Right, but we are here and active. Maybe if people would quit leaving the church in reaction to right wingers, the church would be a stronger force for change in our world."

Another reader, Rev. Jim Altman, pastor of Cadott, Stanley, and Thorp United Methodist Churches in Stanley, Wis., called my article "a cheap shot." He explained, "There are credible progressive Christian voices out there who are rarely reported by even the progressive media. My response to Mr. Fisher's question is that nobody's asking us. I, for one, would love to give a Christian's response to Rep. Virgil Goode's outrageous rant against his fellow congressman Keith Ellison, but media outlets seem only interested in conflating Christianity with the religion of Falwell and Robertson. The majority of Christians in this country do not subscribe to 'The Old-Time Gospel Hour' or 'The 700 Club,' and do not worship in 'mega-churches,' yet when journalists look for the American 'Christian' response we get Jerry, Pat, or some blow-dried dandy from the Church of What's Trendy. Most of the Christians I know would support Rep. Ellison's freedom of religion and more than a few would argue that the world still has much good to learn from Islam, but in the theater of journalism, inflammation trumps reason and cartoon trumps reality."

Well, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. I wrote, "You might not be aware of it, but there is a robust community of progressive Christians in America, struggling to get its voice heard. That's a tough task when you don't have the deep pockets and the cynical White House connections to effectively drown out dissent. Or change the subject. It's a lot easier for this wedge constituency to get people worried that if same-sex unions become legal, they'll all be forced to marry a gay or a lesbian than it is to speak out for the homeless, the poor, those who have no health care, and for religious tolerance to find common ground."

There are dozens of progressive Christian websites and blogs and many of them have spoken out against Rep. Goode. For example, the simple advice from Rev. Tim Simpson's Christian Alliance for Progress was, "Stand up for religious freedom, tell Rep. Virgil Goode that America is still 'one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.'" Cross Left's admonition to its readers is: "Stand Up for Religious Freedom, Tell Rep. Virgil Goode to Stop Attacking US Muslims."

The Christian Alliance's reader response was plentiful and passionate.

One reader wrote, "The attempt to conflate Islamophobia with immigration reform is laughable, except I can only imagine that we'll only see more of it from the Right. Once they come up with an intellectually unfounded conflation of issues, they tend to use it relentlessly until it takes hold in the minds of enough people for it to enter the cultural discourse (see their attempts to claim that all gays are pedophiles)."

Another wrote, "No matter what nonsense Congressman Virgil Goode spouts, he'll continue to be reelected by his constituency of good-ole-boys from Franklin County, Virginia. I live in a Congressional district adjacent to Goode's so I know whereof I speak. Please, please let's all allow good ole Virge to keep on writing and speaking as he pleases. The more Rep. Goode writes and says to expose his own narrow-minded ignorance, the more progressives will feel emboldened to vote against his willful stupidity."

And yet another said, "It is truly sad that the people of Goode's district and believe me, there are many, many good people in that district, aren't standing up and demanding either a retraction of his remarks or his removal from office ... The former bastion of the Confederacy lingers with those like Goode who have no respect or tolerance for anyone different from them."

Well, I'm afraid these are voices in the wilderness. The web sites and broadcasts run by "values" groups like Focus on the Family, the 700 Club, and the Family Research Council, attract many more people and, as one of my readers rightly points out, are routinely turned to by journalists in need of a "religious source."

It is worth noting that Tony Perkins's Family Research Council website claims it has "led the way in defending religious freedom in the public square," yet has been silent on the Goode affair. The websites of the other major right-wing "values" groups have either ignored the issue, or presented it as "straight news," but using code-words such as references to Goode's opposition from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Foundation for Moral Law, led by dismissed Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore, inveighed that Ellis should not be allowed to take his congressional seat at all.

True, there are some counter-balances with national reputations, like Jim Wallis of Sojourners, the Interfaith Council, and the National Council of Churches, but they attract nothing like the media coverage given to the Religious Right.

All of which suggests that if religious extremism doesn't really represent the views of most Christians, the more progressive forces within Christianity - and Judaism and Islam - need to become as unified and aggressive and determined as those who have sadly become the public faces of these great faiths by hijacking. They need to do more to organize nationally, to raise substantial funds, and to be much more proactively media savvy.

That's not an easy task and it won't happen quickly. But it's the only way to at least level the playing field of religious discourse.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.

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Ford/Nixon Conspiracy? | A "Good" Troop Surge

PEEK Newsletter December 28th, 2006 More blogs and video »

A sample of what you've been missing for all the gift giving, family dinners, and TV... A Ford/Nixon Conspiracy? [VIDEO] By Evan Derkacz Ford may have promised to pardon Nixon in order to become president... Ford's legacy is Cheney and Rumsfeld By Tara Lohan Jon Wiener writes for the Nation about the political appointments made by Ford. Castro Outlives Another American President By Alexander Zaitchik Alexander Zaitchik: Remembering Gerald Ford (and Frank Church), who took the bulls-eye off the bearded one. Charlie Rangel v. George Bush [VIDEO] By Evan Derkacz An interview End the occupation of Iraq; send Fred Kagan to Vegas … By Joshua Holland Joshua Holland: What every blackjack player knows. Christopher Dodd on withdrawing troops and Presidential bid By Bob Geiger Connecticut Democrat laying groundwork for 2008 ... A soldier's family speaks out ... By Joshua Holland Joshua Holland: And gives the stay-the-course crowd a spanking. 'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?' By Evan Derkacz A Christmas Card... Have Clinton and Obama really cleared the 2008 field? By Bob Geiger 2008 Democratic nomination far from wrapped up American McMuslim [VIDEO] By Evan Derkacz A Christian from Middle America spends '30 Days' as a Muslim... Place Your Bets: Pro Occupation, or Pro Iraq? By Raed Jarrar Raed Jarrar: The Bush administration is not just beating a dead horse in Iraq -- it's betting all our tax money on it. How Much Risk Can We Risk? By Don Hazen Don Hazen: Intervention: Confronting The Real Risks of Genetic Engineering And Life On A Biotech Planet, a new book by Denise Caruso, raises many tough questions.

OTHER NEWS

THE FORGOTTEN HIPPOS OF PABLO ESCOBAR

CHRIS KRAUL, LA TIMES, COLUMBIA - Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's
pleasure palace, a 5,500-acre estate where the notorious drug lord
reigned over million-dollar cocaine deals, parties with underage girls
and visits by shadowy men of power. . . He built a bullring, an
airstrip, an ersatz Jurassic Park with half a dozen immense concrete
dinosaurs. He stocked a private wild animal park with hundreds of
animals, including elephants, camels, giraffes, ostriches and zebras. He
installed four hippos in one of the estate's 12 man-made lakes.

Today, Hacienda Napoles is in ruins, taken over by jungle foliage and
bats. The sprawling Spanish-style mansion has been gutted, scavenged by
treasure hunters looking for stashes of gold and cash buried under the
floors. Escobar is long gone, cut down in a hail of police gunfire. But
the hippos are still here. . .

The hippos were never claimed because they were too large and ornery to
move. Now the original four have multiplied to 16 and, far from starving
to death, as some expected, they have learned to forage like cows. In
fact, local authorities say they represent a safety hazard — and are
standing in the way of plans to redevelop the late drug lord's estate.
At night, several of them emerge from their watery habitats and roam for
miles looking for grass to munch on. Three months ago, a male hippo was
shot to death by ranchers after he wandered three miles from the rest of
the herd to a neighboring stream.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hippos20dec20,0,5373140.
story?coll=la-home-headlines

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FBI MISSING NEARLY A QUARTER OF FILES RELATING TO LEAK INVESTIGATIONS

JOSH GERSTEIN, NY SUN - The FBI is missing nearly a quarter of its files
relating to investigations of recent leaks of classified information,
according to a court filing the bureau made last week.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI said it
identified 94 leak investigations since 2001, but that the investigative
files in 22 of those cases "are missing" and cannot be located. "There
is no physical slip of paper on the shelf which indicates that the file
has been charged out to a particular FBI employee, so therefore there is
no way of knowing where the file may actually be," an official in the
bureau's records division, Peggy Bellando, wrote in a December 22
declaration.

"That's an amazing number," an academic who has studied the FBI's
record-keeping procedures, Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, said
in an interview yesterday. "These are very sensitive investigations. ...
They could be called to account for whether they are monitoring
reporters. These are records that should be handled very well."

http://www.nysun.com/article/45755

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BRAZILIAN PASSENGERS STRIKE BACK AT OVERBOOKED AIRLINES

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE - Brazilian holiday travelers incensed
about an overbooked flight stormed an airport tarmac to prevent a
commercial jet from taking off, and a tourism industry leader said two
months of chronic flight delays have created a "disaster" for tourism in
Latin America's largest country.

Wednesday's protest happened after a group of about 30 travelers with
tickets from Sao Paulo to the northeastern city of Recife waited more
than 40 minutes aboard an airline transport bus outside a Tam Linhas
Aereas SA jet at one of Sao Paulo's two airports, Brazil's Globo TV
reported.

When the crew closed the jet's door because the plane was full, some of
the passengers got off the bus in an attempt to stop the plane from
leaving. Police removed them from the tarmac, but the flight was delayed
for more than two hours. Last week, Brazilians invaded runways at
several jammed airports plagued by delays just before Christmas.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/28/america/LA_GEN_Brazil_Flight_Delays.php

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Workers Wrestle With the Future at Ford

By Ellen Simon
The Associated Press

Tuesday 26 December 2006

Detroit - Scott Swiercz smoked a cigarette and drank a beer at The Final Score lounge, mulling the biggest gamble of his life.

Ford Motor Co. had offered him and its 75,000 other U.S. hourly workers a choice of buyout packages. One option: A $100,000 lump sum payment to completely sever his relationship with Ford. Taking the money would mean no job and no health care. For Swiercz, 40, who has two ex-wives and pays $157.50 each week in child support for his 14-year-old son, taking the buyout would be the equivalent of a third divorce. The math just didn't work.

The cheapest health insurance he found cost $450 a month. Then there was the child support. "I don't mind paying it," he said. "I wish I could give more." That totaled $1,080 each month before he paid rent or put gas in the car.

Like all hourly workers, he had to make a decision by Nov. 27. He chose to stay on the production line at Ford's Woodhaven Stamping Plant, where he's weeks away from hitting 11 years seniority.

The decision feels "100 percent" like a gamble, he said.

He's gambling that the plant will stay open. He's gambling that, if it does, enough workers will take buyouts so Ford can avoid layoffs there. He's gambling that a worker from a closing plant who has more seniority won't bump him off the job.

"A lot of people I talk to say, 'It's just like craps. It's a roll of the dice,'" he said.

For hourly workers at Ford, making a decision on the buyout offers required a combination of economic calculations and soul searching. Some 38,000 Ford workers _ roughly half of Ford's U.S. hourly work force _ said they would take one of Ford's eight buyout packages. Workers can rescind their acceptance until their last day of work. Those who do go will start leaving the company in January, the rest will be gone by September.

The workers who are staying are every bit as nervous as those starting over.

The Woodhaven plant still runs three shifts, including a midnight crew of machinists who tend to equipment that dates back to the end of World War II. Workers there got good news the Friday before Christmas, when Ford said it would be one of six plants where the company plans to invest a total of $1 billion, in exchange for $151 million in tax incentives from the state.

The buyout and the future have been the dominant topic of conversation there for six months, Swiercz said.

"You talk to 25 people a day, that's what 10 people are talking about," he said. "Not, 'How are your kids?' or 'What are you doing for Christmas?' (It's) 'You taking the buyout?'

"Everybody's worried about everything now," Swiercz said.

Bad Times

Hard times at Ford, General Motors Corp., DaimlerChrysler Corp. and their suppliers mean hard times for Michigan, where all three are headquartered and where the auto industry dominates the economy. The state is on track to lose 336,000 jobs between mid-2000 and the end of 2006, the longest stretch of job losses since the Great Depression.

Michigan was the only state to lose jobs for the last year. Its unemployment rate, 6.9 percent in November, was second only to Mississippi. University of Michigan economists expect Michigan's rate to hit 7.7 percent in 2008. The state leads the nation in the number of homes in foreclosure.

No one is untouched. Advertising agencies, high-end restaurants, stores that embroider the backs of windbreakers are all feeling the pinch.

Contracts expire between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three in 2007, and some argue union concessions are the only way the Big Three can compete with Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.

"Because Michigan has such a huge concentration of these unionized auto jobs, they dominate the economy," said Donald Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations.

"The governor is trying to do a lot of good things, so are foundations, but they're small potatoes, in scale, compared to the auto industry," he said. "Nothing is going to overshadow those auto contract negotiations.... That determines Michigan's future."

He added, "If people realized how generous the labor agreements were, I think they'd be astounded."

Auto workers, who can make $60,000 a year without overtime, and more than $100,000 with it, "know they're never going to make this kind of money again," said Denise Brooks, who has worked for 13 1/2 years at the Brownstown Ford plant. The money, for a family with only one wage earner, isn't as rich as it sounds, she said, but no auto worker starting a new career from the bottom will be able to match it.

"No matter how dirty, or greasy, or poorly they feel they've been treated, when they drive out of the plant in their brand-new Ford, they're a citizen of the world," she said. "They've got a good credit rating. They're used to buying what they want for their children and not having to worry about it."

Brooks, 50, took a package that will give her half her pay, health insurance and up to $15,000 tuition reimbursement for four years while she gets a Ph.D. in psychology.

She went to a retirement party a couple weeks ago, looked around, and started to cry. The current generation of workers, the ones with cottages up north, boats, annual hunting trips, would be the last, she realized.

"It was a retirement party for a whole way of life," she said.

A Rich Deal

The UAW's critics say union work rules make it nearly impossible to fire a bad worker. A 2 1/2 hour lunch for a union worker at one of the bars near a plant wasn't unheard of. And union workers didn't pay a penny for health insurance until last year; now a family pays only $700 a year, Grimes said.

Auto workers counter that it's punishing work.

Cynthia Allison was a single mother raising a daughter, Donielle, and getting welfare before she got a job at Ford's Dearborn Truck plant. A cousin working for Ford in Illinois got her on a waiting list for a job; she waited two years to get it. Nothing had prepared her for how physically punishing it would be.

Her first day, "I kept saying, 'The money, Cindy, the money. A future for you and for Donny.' When I got off that 4 a.m. shift, each step I took, my head said, 'Boom. Boom. Boom.'"

She's stayed at Ford 12 more years. Auto plant equipment is designed to be ergonomically correct, but Allison is 5'2" and it's not ergonomically correct for her.

She comes home with bruises and has no idea how she got them. She's popped her knee, she's popped her back, she cut herself, she got hit in the head with a Mustang. She's on a first-name basis with the plant's nurse, Kathleen, who gets her through some shifts by giving her Biofreeze gel for sore muscles. Allison, 41, describes it as "the street version of Bengay."

Allison, who also raised one of her nieces, is taking the $100,000 buyout.

"I think I would be more afraid to stay than I am nervous to leave," she said.

She's planning short-term and long-term investments for her money, but she's afraid some co-workers taking the buyout are going to spend every penny and be broke by next year.

Not her. Her $27 an hour salary on its way out, she's moved from a $1,200-a month apartment in suburban Southfield to a $700 apartment in Detroit. She has no home phone, no cable, she's stopped shopping for everything but necessities, she no longer eats at restaurants and she's bartending nights.

Asked at the end of a long conversation if there's anything else she wants to say, she says, "Thank you. Thank you, Ford, for helping me raise my daughters, making it possible as a single parent. I don't want them to think I didn't appreciate the time. Without them, I couldn't have done a lot of the things I did for my daughters, or my family."

Running the Numbers

Rob Williams, a tool and die worker with 10 years at Ford, is 35, with plenty of friends who took the buyout.

One started his own real estate company. Another is starting a butcher shop, specializing in deer killed by local hunters. One changes his plan daily, from hauling boats to giving tours of Lake Michigan.

"One of my buddies took the first round _ she's lying around the couch all day, doing nothing," he said.

The buyout is a gift for workers near retirement, who can leave with pension payments and health insurance. Some friends are retiring to Arizona, some to Florida.

Like everyone else far from retirement, he now views his future like a math story problem, with too many variables to solve.

There are about 140 tool and die workers at the plant, he said, and about 40 are eligible to retire. But, in seniority, he's third from the bottom.

If his plant, Woodhaven Stamping, stays open, workers from closed plants who have more seniority are free to work at Woodhaven if they choose, "bumping" workers there. Then he'd be unemployed, with no buyout cash to cushion him. But he'd get unemployment benefits.

He looked at jobs elsewhere, put in three applications out of state and heard nothing. There were a couple places in Tennessee looking for tool and die workers, but they were Toyota suppliers and can barely bring himself to say the word "Toyota." He didn't apply.

So he's staying. A conversation with his uncle, a recently retired Ford tool and die maker who rode out the downturn in the 1980s, helped him make the decision.

"He said, 'Don't you dare.'"

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