We are so screwed

New York Times: How to Hack an Election

"Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails..."

The Theocrat cometh

Bill Berkowitz: Slouching Toward Theocracy

"On balance, however, Team Bush has achieved much more than most people think. On January 15, the White House issued a press release boasting seven "Milestones for the President's Initiative." As originally conceived, Bush's faith-based initiative was to be the centerpiece of his administration's domestic agenda?spearheading the final attack on the New Deal and the War on Poverty, transferring a host of government programs from government agencies to the religious sector..."

Real women need not apply

Katha Pollitt: Judy, Judy, Judy

"The attack on Dr. Judy began on the front page of the New York Times (you know, the ultraliberal paper) with a January 13 feature by Jodi Wilgoren, full of catty remarks about her "sensible slipper flats and no makeup or earrings" and fatuous observations from such academic eminences as Myra Gutin, "who has taught a course on first ladies at Rider University in New Jersey for 20 years." It seems that Dr. Steinberg "fits nowhere" in Professor Gutin's categorizations. Given that she counts Pat Nixon as an "emerging spokeswoman," maybe that's not such a bad thing. "The doctors Dean seem to be in need of some tips on togetherness and building a healthy political marriage," opined Maureen Dowd, a single woman who, even if she weds tomorrow, will be in a nursing home by the time she's been married for twenty-three years like the Deans..."

What? They got the Republican vote locked in, don't they?

John Nichols: Bush slipping among Republicans, N.H. vote shows

"Many New Hampshire primary participants decided to skip the formalities and simply vote against the president in Tuesday's Republican primary. Thousands of these Bush-bashing Republicans went so far as to write in the names of Democratic presidential contenders..."

Investors delight

Eric Laursen: A Stealth Tax on Wages

"This year, the Administration is finally pressing forward in the direction O'Neill had favored, with a series of initiatives that would eliminate much if not most taxation of savings and investment, and instead aim the tax collector's net squarely at workers' wages..."

Driven away

Richard Florida: Creative Class War - How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy.

"Roger Pederson is one of the leading researchers in the field of stem cells. But in 2001, he left his position at the University of California, San Francisco, to take up residency at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology Medicine at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. His departure illustrates how the creative economy is being reshaped--by our competitors growing savvy and by our own cluelessness. Pederson bolted because the British government aggressively recruited him, but also because the Bush administration put heavy restrictions on stem-cell research. "I have a soft spot in my heart for America," he recently told Wired magazine. "But the U.K. is much better for this research.... more working capital." And, he continued, "they haven't made such a political football out of stem cells."

Stem cells are vital to the body because of their ability to develop any kind of tissue. Scientists play a similar role in the economy; their discoveries (silicon circuitry, gene splicing) are the source of most big new industries (personal computers, biotechnology). Unfortunately, Roger Pederson's departure may be among the first of many. "Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all. There is an E.U. fellowship through the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Amsterdam that everyone and their mother is trying to get..."

Creative Class War
How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy.

By Richard Florida

Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.

When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand.

Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood. When Hollywood produces movies of this magnitude, it creates jobs for directors, actors, and key grips in California. Because of the astounding level of technical innovation which a project of this size requires, in such areas as computer graphics, sound design, and animation, it can also germinate whole new companies and even new industries nationwide, just as George Lucas's Star Wars films fed the development of everything from video games to product tie-in marketing. But the lion's share of benefits from The Lord of the Rings is likely to accrue not to the United States but to New Zealand. Next, with a rather devastating symbolism, Jackson will remake King Kong in Wellington, with a budget running upwards of $150 million.

Peter Jackson's power play hasn't been mentioned by any of the current candidates running for president. Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the "safe" jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents' fate.

But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy. Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs.

We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other's knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment in southern California, new financial instruments in New York, computer products in northern California and Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington, D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology in Boston. The economic benefits of these advances soon spread to much of the rest of the country, as Ohio-born MBAs in Raleigh-Durham built credit-card call centers in Iowa, and Indian computer whizzes in Chicago devised inventory software that brought new profitability to car factories in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step--or if you will, the first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects of what we consider brainwork--writing computer code, analyzing X-rays--are being lured away by countries like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs and educated workforces large enough to do the job. Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn't happened.

What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle.

As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications.

Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships.

But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here."

Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic change in the country's political-economic demographics. As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with "blue" patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the "red" parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands. The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America's creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it's what's really at stake in the 2004 elections.

Yankees doodle

Roger Pederson is one of the leading researchers in the field of stem cells. But in 2001, he left his position at the University of California, San Francisco, to take up residency at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology Medicine at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. His departure illustrates how the creative economy is being reshaped--by our competitors growing savvy and by our own cluelessness. Pederson bolted because the British government aggressively recruited him, but also because the Bush administration put heavy restrictions on stem-cell research. "I have a soft spot in my heart for America," he recently told Wired magazine. "But the U.K. is much better for this research.... more working capital." And, he continued, "they haven't made such a political football out of stem cells."

Stem cells are vital to the body because of their ability to develop any kind of tissue. Scientists play a similar role in the economy; their discoveries (silicon circuitry, gene splicing) are the source of most big new industries (personal computers, biotechnology). Unfortunately, Roger Pederson's departure may be among the first of many. "Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all. There is an E.U. fellowship through the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Amsterdam that everyone and their mother is trying to get."

But the bigger problem isn't that Americans are going elsewhere. It's that for the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come here. We are so used to thinking that the world's leading creative minds, like the world's best basketball and baseball players, always want to come to the States, while our people go overseas only if they are second-rate or washed up, that it's hard to imagine it could ever be otherwise. And it's still true that because of our country's size, its dynamism, its many great universities, and large government research budgets, we're the Yankees of science. But like the Yankees, we've been losing some of our best players. And even great teams can go into slumps.

The altered flow of talent is already beginning to show signs of crimping the scientific process. "We can't hold scientific meetings here [in the United States] anymore because foreign scientists can't get visas," a top oceanographer at the University of California at San Diego recently told me. The same is true of graduate students, the people who do the legwork of scientific research and are the source of many powerful ideas. The graduate students I have taught at several major universities -- Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon -- have always been among the first to point out the benefits of studying and doing research in the United States. But their impressions have changed dramatically over the past year. They now complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security, and that America is abandoning its standing as an open society. Many are thinking of leaving for foreign schools, and they tell me that their friends and colleagues back home are no longer interested in coming to the United States for their education but are actively seeking out universities in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere.

It would be comforting to think that keeping out the foreigners would mean more places for home-grown talent in our top graduate programs and research faculties. Alas, it doesn't work that way: We have many brilliant young people, but not nearly enough to fill all the crucial slots. Last year, for instance, a vast, critical artificial intelligence project at MIT had to be jettisoned because the university couldn't find enough graduate students who weren't foreigners and who could thus clear new security regulations.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to science; other sectors are beginning to suffer. The pop-music magazine Tracks, for instance, recently reported that a growing number of leading world musicians, from South African singer and guitarist Vusi Mahlasela to the Bogota-based electronica collective Sidestepper, have had to cancel their American tours because they were refused visas, while Youssou N'Dour, perhaps the globe's most famous music artist, cancelled his largest-ever U.S. tour last spring to protest the invasion of Iraq.

These may seem small signs, but they're not. America's music industry has been, for decades, the world's standard setter. The songs of American artists are heard on radio stations from Caracas to Istanbul; their soundtracks are an integral part of the worldwide appeal of American movies. The profits earned from American music exports help keep America's balance-of-payments deficits from getting too far into the red zone. Yet part of what makes American music so vital is its ability to absorb and incorporate the sounds of other countries--from American hip-hop picking up Caribbean Reggae and Indian Bhangra beats, to hard rock musicians using industrial instrumentation from Germany. For American artists and fans, not being able to see touring foreign bands is the equivalent of the computer industry not getting access to the latest chips: It dulls the competitive edge.

Our loss of access to high-level foreign talent hasn't drawn much attention from political leaders and the media, for understandable reasons: We seem to have bigger, more immediate problems, from the war on terrorism to the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, service, and creative sectors to China, India, and Mexico. But just as our obsession with the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War caused us to miss the emerging economic challenge of Japan, our eyes may not be on the biggest threat to our economic well-being.

For several years now, my colleagues and I have been measuring the underlying factors common to those American cities and regions with the highest level of creative economic growth. The chief factors we've found are: large numbers of talented individuals, a high degree of technological innovation, and a tolerance of diverse lifestyles. Recently my colleague Irene Tinagli of Carnegie Mellon and I have applied the same analysis to northern Europe, and the findings are startling. The playing field is much more level than you might think. Sweden tops the United States on this measure, with Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark close behind. The United Kingdom and Belgium are also doing well. And most of these countries, especially Ireland, are becoming more creatively competitive at a faster rate than the United States.

Though the data are not as perfect at the metropolitan level, other cities are also beating us for fresh new talent, diversity, and brainpower. Vancouver and Toronto are set to take off: Both city-regions have a higher concentration of immigrants than New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. So too are Sydney and Melbourne. As creative centers, they would rank alongside Washington, D.C. and New York City. Many of these places also offer such further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life. They're safe. They're rarely at war. These cities are becoming the global equivalents of Boston or San Francisco, transforming themselves from small, obscure places to creative hotbeds that draw talent from all over--including your city and mine.

Catch the waves

The sudden stalling of our creative economy threatens to undermine two decades of progress. Twenty years ago, America's economy had hit a crisis point, with record unemployment, stagnant productivity, a rusting industrial base, and an oil crisis that highlighted a dangerous dependence upon raw materials whose supply it could not necessarily guarantee.

But underneath the surface, some interesting things were happening. Previous investments in scientific research by both government and industry were yielding new technologies, from inexpensive computer chips to fiber optics. New financial instruments and practices were making capital more available for innovative new ventures. American film, television, and music were finding new export markets. U.S. corporations, spurred by competition from Japan and guided by best-selling books like Tom Peters's In Search of Excellence, were restructuring, pushing decision-making down the chain of command and into the hands of high-initiative line employees. And everywhere, economists and managers were talking about the need for more "human capital"--the buzz phrase meaning educated workers who could think on their feet.

Eventually, supply met demand thanks to two great migrations: first, a wave of foreign immigrants, following a loosening of immigration laws in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, more than six million immigrants settled in the United States, the greatest number in half a century. In the 1990s, 12 million more arrived. Most were unskilled and found work in factories, restaurants, and construction. But many came with good schooling and went into our universities and leading industries. Today, 11 percent of foreign-born adults in the United States have a graduate or professional degree, compared to only 9 percent of natives. Most of these educated immigrants originally congregated in a handful of big vibrant cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but many have since moved to smaller hotspots like Tucson, Chapel Hill, and Colorado Springs.

Without these immigrants, our high-tech economy would be unthinkable. Intel, Sun Microsystems, Google: All were founded or co-founded by immigrants from places like Russia, India, and Hungary. Nearly a third of all businesses founded in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were started by Chinese- or Indian-born entrepreneurs, according to the detailed statistical research of Annalee Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley. And thousands upon thousands more constitute the technical core of our high-tech economy.

The second great migration was an internal one: Millions of young, energetic and talented Americans from traditional industrial centers, small towns, and rural areas, packed up their Hondas and moved to more-thriving metro areas--generally the same ones that the immigrants came to. These native-born migrants helped to design and then feed the emerging creative industries that during the 1990s would come to define the age.

This influx of talent turned America's creative centers into boomtowns. Salaries skyrocketed, followed by housing prices--especially those in the funky inner-city neighborhoods and gracious close-in suburbs favored by the product designers, video editors, hedge-fund analysts, and marketing consultants who made up this emerging new creative class. The rising living costs and go-go lifestyles engendered by the incoming creative class in turn drove out some of the lesser-educated natives, and even many of these creative migrants eventually had their fill and returned to their hometowns. The statistician Robert Cushing has come up with telling evidence of the economic impacts of these reciprocal migrations. Using Internal Revenue Service data, he found that families moving from Austin, a high-tech boomtown, to slower-growth Kansas City in the 1990s earned an average of $25,912 a year. Those going in the other direction, from Kansas City to Austin, earned over $65,000. He found similar disparities between Austin and other older cities: Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.

But it's not as if the Clevelands and Kansas Cities didn't advance at all. Most added some jobs thanks to local nodes of creativity, such as university-connected medical centers, or managed not to lose as many jobs in their existing companies as they might have absent the help of innovations--primarily information technology--that the creative centers gave birth to. Average incomes in these places rose more slowly, or in some cases declined, but people's purchasing power generally increased, again thanks to creative-center innovations. Patrons of 7-Elevens in Moberly, Mo., could pick up a Motorola cell phone designed by Chinese-born engineers in suburban Chicago for $30, or order any number of ever-lower-priced goods from Seattle-based Amazon.com (founded by the son of a Cuban immigrant) using ever-cheaper computers purchased at CompUSA, headquartered in Dallas.

The big sort

These migrations had not only economic consequences but cultural ones. The last 20 years has seen the rise of the "culture wars"--between those who value traditional virtues, and others drawn to new lifestyles and diversity of opinion. In truth, this clash mostly played out among intellectuals of the left and right; as sociologist Alan Wolfe has shown, most Americans manage a subtle balance between the two tendencies. Still, the cleavages exist, roughly paralleling the ideologies of the two political parties. And increasingly in the 1990s, they expressed themselves geographically, as more and more Americans chose to live in places that suited their culture and lifestyle preferences.

This movement of people is what the journalist Bill Bishop and I have referred to as the Big Sort, a sifting with enormous political and cultural implications, which has helped to give rise to what political demographer James Gimpel of the University of Maryland calls a "patchwork nation." City by city, neighborhood to neighborhood, Gimpel and others have found, our politics are becoming more concentrated and polarized. We may live in a 50-50 country, but the actual places we live (inner-ring v. outer-ring suburbs, San Francisco v. Fresno) are much more likely to distribute their loyalties 60-40, and getting more lopsided rather than less. These divisions arise not from some master plan but from millions upon millions of individual choices. Individuals are sorting themselves into communities of like-minded people which validate their choices and identities. Gay sales reps buy ramshackle old houses in the city and renovate them; straight, married sales reps purchase newly-built houses with yards on the suburban fringe. Conservative tech geeks move to Dallas, while liberal ones are more likely to go to San Francisco. Young African Americans who can write code find their way to Atlanta or Washington, D.C., while whites with the same education and skills are more likely to migrate to Seattle or Austin. Working-class Southern Californian whites priced out of the real estate market and perhaps feeling overwhelmed by the influx of Mexicans move to suburban Phoenix. More than ever before, those who possess the means move to the city and neighborhood that reinforces their social and cultural view of the world.

And while there are no hard and fast rules--some liberals prefer suburbs of modest metro areas with lots of churches and shopping malls, some conservatives like urban neighborhoods with coffee shops--in general, these cultural and lifestyle preferences overlap with political ones (which the political parties have accentuated with computer-assisted redistricting). In 1980, according to Robert Cushing's detailed analysis of the election results, there wasn't a significant difference between how high-tech and low-tech regions voted for president; the difference between the parties still depended upon other factors. By 2000, however, the 21 regions with the largest concentrations of the creative class and the highest-tech economies voted Democratic at rates 17 percent above the national average. Regions with lower levels of creative people and low-tech economies, along with rural America, went Republican. In California, the most Democratic of states, George Bush won the state's 14 low-tech regions and rural areas by 210,000 votes. Al Gore took the 12 high-tech regions and their suburbs by over 1.5 million.

Mutual contempt

Bill Clinton was, in many ways the midwife of the new creative economy. Present at the birth of the '90s boom, he recognized it quickly for what it was and helped spur it by such projects as wiring poor and middle-class school classrooms around the country for the Internet and beating back Republican efforts to cut immigration. For this, he was beloved not only by creatives, but also by many of those in Red America whom he convinced would benefit from the new economy. But he also personally symbolized the creative-class archetype--its libertine character, its cleverness, its global-mindedness. For this, he drew the lasting enmity of many millions of those in the "other" America. It's often been said that Clinton was the embodiment of the '60s, and one's position for or against him revealed one's attitude towards that era. It's perhaps more precise to say that with his constant hyping of new technologies and "bridge to the twenty-first century" rhetoric, Clinton was the embodiment of what the '60s became--the creative class '90s, hip but pro-growth, open-minded and progressive but ambitious.

While Clinton and the Democrats increasingly drew their support from the high-tech parts of the country, the Republicans increasingly came to represent the low-tech areas. Republican leaders like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were beginning, during the early 1990s, to articulate the cultural and political antagonism Red America felt towards the emerging creative-class culture. But the politician who most skillfully spoke to these grievances was George W. Bush.

Clinton's whole life is a testimony to the power of education to change class. Bush prides himself on the idea that his Yale education had no effect on how he sees things. Clinton was a famous world traveler, appreciative of foreign cultures and ideas. Bush, throughout his life, has been indifferent if not hostile to all of that. Clinton, especially in the early years of his administration, had the loose, unstructured management style of an academic department or a dot-com--manic work hours, meetings that went on forever, lots of diffuse power centers, young people running around in casual clothing, and a constant reappraising of plans and strategies. The Bush management style embodies the pre-creative corporate era--formal, hierarchal, with decision-making concentrated in the hands of only the most senior executives. Clinton was happy in Hollywood and vacationed in Martha's Vineyard. Bush can't wait to get back to Crawford. Clinton reveled in the company of writers, artists, scientists, and members of the intellectual elite. Bush has little tolerance for them. Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies, wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class--high technology, a tolerant culture--to the hinterlands. Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center, Washington, D.C.

As president, Bush chose a group of senior advisors whose economic backgrounds have a century-old flavor. His vice president is an oil man. His treasury secretary, John Snow, is a railroad man. The White House's economic and fiscal policies have been similarly designed to provide life support for these aging red-state industries: $190 billion in subsidies for farmers; tariffs for steel; subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory relief for logging, mining, coal, and natural gas. Even Bush's tax policy shows the same old-economy preference. His dividend tax cut was supported by mainstream, blue-chip companies, which stood to gain, but opposed by high-tech executives, whose company stocks seldom pay dividends.

Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts of the country now wield ultimate political power, while the creative centers--source of most of America's economic growth--have virtually none. Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer speak for Silicon Valley and Hollywood. New York's Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, also Democrats, represent New York's finance and publishing industries. Washington State, home to Starbucks and Microsoft, has two Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. Boston's Route 128 and Washington's high-tech Maryland suburbs are also represented by Democratic senators. It's hard to understate how little influence these senators have with the Bush White House and in the GOP-controlled Congress.

The new Ellis Island

You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize that the political polarization of America and GOP dominance of Washington are not necessarily good news for America's economic future. Yet it's clear that Democrats themselves don't quite get it.

All the current Democratic aspirants to the White House have whacked Bush for undermining our alliances and diplomatic capabilities through his unilateralism. A few, including Sen. John Kerry, have criticized the president as "anti-science." But none seems to have understood--or at least articulated--the disastrous economic consequences of these Know-Nothing views. In the post-1990s global economy, America must aggressively compete with other developed countries for the international talent that can spur new industries and new jobs. By thumbing our nose at the world and dismissing the consensus views of the scientific community, we are scaring off that talent and sending it to our competitors.

If there is any candidate who speaks for the creative class right now, it is Howard Dean. His educated, tech-savvy supporters and grass-roots, non-hierarchal campaign structure perfectly represent the creative economy. Yet his economic message has so far focused on luring swing-state unionists--criticizing Bush, for instance, for not extending steel tariffs.

America must not only stop making dumb mistakes, like starting trade wars with Europe and China; it must also put in place new policies that enhance our creative economy. Here, too, neither party quite gets it. Most of the Democratic candidates for president have rightly sounded the alarm about rising college-tuition costs and offered ideas to expand college access. That's well and good, but we need to think far, far bigger. Our research universities are immigrant magnets, the Ellis Islands of the 21st century. And, with the demand among our own citizens for elite education far outstripping the supply, we should embark on a massive university building spree, for which we will be paid back many-fold in future economic growth. Building some of these top-flight universities in struggling red-state regions might give their economies a shot at a better future and help bridge the growing political divide.

Democrats have understandably seized on the corporate outsourcing of jobs as a campaign issue. But let's get real: Demanding higher labor and environmental standards in trade agreements--the Democrats' favorite fix--is not going to keep software jobs from migrating to Eastern Europe. Our only hope is to strengthen our creative economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the ones we're losing. That will require taking on the Washington lobbyists who put the fix in for established industries at the expense of emerging ones. Millions of new jobs in the wireless networking field, for instance, could be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled by TV networks and the military, could be freed up. When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate talk about that?

It is a sad irony: America's creative economy sparked a demographic shift and a political polarization that now threaten to choke that economy off. What America desperately needs now is political leadership savvy enough to bridge that gap. To his credit, President Bush has made the Republican Party much more immigrant-friendly. But his talk about diversity seems almost entirely pitched to win the working-class Hispanic vote; he seems uninterested, to say the least, in changing other policies that are driving away the high-end immigrants and generally undermining the creative economy. To his credit, Howard Dean has tried to speak to his party of the need to put forth policies that appeal to citizens in both blue and red parts of the country. But as he showed with remarks about reaching out to guys with rebel flags on their pickups, he seems, to say the least, not to have found the language to do so.

The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and to start paying attention to economic policies that might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to the rest of the country, to convince at least some of its many regions that policies which operate to the interests of the creative class are in their interests as well.

Richard Florida is the Heinz professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class.

The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised

John Perry Barlow's Conversation with his Friends

As the Dean campaign started to raise serious money and support on the Internet last fall, it became common for the likes of me to go around trumpeting that this election might be for the Internet what the 1960 election was for television.

In the wake of Iowa and New Hampshire, it seems evident that, once again, I'm too early with a prediction that may eventually prove accurate. If anything, this election may reconfirm the preeminent role of the idiot box in American politics, just as the Bush administration is demonstrating the power of plutocracy to an extent not witnessed since Karl Rove's political hero William McKinley was elected.

I have seen the past, and it still works.

Politics as usual was working like God's wristwatch in Iowa, where the RNC and various Republican PAC's outspent many of the Democratic candidates on negative TV ads aimed exclusively at Dean. But more damaging, in my opinion, was the remarkably open bias that the traditional media seemed to display against Howard Dean in their presentation of the news itself. I don't watch much television, but what little I've seen in the last month indicated to me that Dean was being systematically slimed.

I witnessed, for example, an astonishing are-you-still-beating-your-wife interview of Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi by CNN's Paula Zahn. Zahn persisted in drilling in on Dean's having said in an NPR interview that the notion the Bush administration had known in advance about 911 in advance was "an interesting theory," refusing, despite Trippi's protests, to read a bit further in the transcript to Dean's unequivocal statement that it was a theory he didn't share.

Dean was taken to severe task for having murmured something on Canadian television four years ago about flaws in the Iowa caucus system. Fox spent an entire day calling him a liar without ever being specific, in my hearing anyway, about what lies he had purportedly told. CNN repeatedly reported that some Iowa voters were referring to Dean volunteers as "Perfect Storm troopers." Indeed, in my extremely random sampling of TV reporting before the Iowa caucuses, I never heard a single reference to Dean that wasn't at least mildly derisive.

Then we had the yawp heard round the world. Dean gave a valedictory to his supporters in Iowa that was no more feverish, in my opinion, than many rally exhortations I've heard over the years, even from such sober fellows as Dick Cheney. Countless football coaches deliver such yells every fall week and yet are lionized by their fans. But, according to the big media, Dean's "yee-haaa" was the sound of political hara-kari. You would have thought they'd caught Dean in bed with either a live man or a dead woman. They belabored him for his shout as though he'd done something truly heinous, like, say, leading America into a major war under false pretenses, or robbing the poor to feed the rich, or dramatically curtailing civil liberties.

All the networks ran the tape like scenes from a terrorist attack, to the accompaniment of much tsk-tsking and head-shaking. Every pundit of any consequence proclaimed it Dean's last howl. But, as I say, I couldn't see what was so bad about it. Prior to this, Dean had seemed a little too tightly-wrapped for my tastes. I was heartened to see him display any emotion beyond justified indignation. But if you have a signal that can be heard everywhere and you transmit often enough the news that someone is crazy, just about everyone will start believing it, whatever the evidence.

This is especially true in a primary campaign where the leading criterion driving candidate preference is the ability to beat the incumbent. Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I'm right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?

I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.

If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.

MoveOn.org had them worried too. It is no mistake that CBS decided that the rather mild MoveOn contest winner was "too controversial" to air during the Superbowl. (Of course, there is no controversy in the message that drinking Budweiser will get you laid by beautiful women you aren't married to. Or in last year's ad proclaiming that smoking marijuana causes terrorism.)

So the empire struck back and it struck back hard, grinding the Dean point off our attack, leaving us with a field that consists of a nice guy who may have been in Washington long enough to dissolve his spine, two crypto-Republicans, a New Age mystic with a bad haircut, the champion of Tawana Brawley, and a sweetly telegenic southerner, about whom no one seems to know much of anything.

More to the point, they may have eliminated the candidate most likely to defeat George Bush, whose adventures at home and abroad are likely to make for another four years of riveting television.

Or have they? Howard Dean has hardly retired from the race, even though he will be running uphill from here. And it may be that the traditional media have done us a favor by beating some of the smug snot-nose out of us. One of problems with the groups that form on the Internet, the readers of this blog being something of an exception, is that they often end up being self-reifying fields of ideological homogeneity. We create our own ideological ghettos which seem much larger to us than they are.

Moreover, while many of us are convinced that the Internet is a powerful environment for organizing belief, it is also a great cacophony against which even the diminished voice of broadcast retains a kind of clarity. I believe I have just seen demonstrated the power of that signal. Can we create one of our own that is heard as clearly by the public in general? That remains to be seen. Now, at least, we know what we're up against.

Of course, there remains the possibility that the big media didn't beat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire at all. It may simply be that the new media failed to win. We may have been too glued to our monitors to remember that while elections get won by money - 12 out of 13 races in the last Congressional elections were won by the candidate who spent the most - they are also won by people on the ground. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, we will have to work very hard, in dreary, traditional ways, to get him elected.

Some of us believe that another four years of the Bush Administration might turn America into something so oligarchical that it will make Mexico look like Sweden, so broke that the dollar will buy less than the Hungarian pengo, surveillant enough to make East Germany look like a good start, and puritanical enough to make Cotton Mather feel at home. Some of us want a president who is straight about his real reasons for sending our kids off to die and kill other kids, a government that is of, for, and by more people than will fit on the Forbes list, and a military that isn't simply a private security force for the Fortune 500. We want to give our grandchildren something more than a crushing debt and a country too stripped of resources and opportunities to pay it off. The stakes seem high to us.

But if we feel that way, and many of us do, we will have to knock on doors and persuade the folks inside to turn off their televisions and talk about what's really going on, just as we will have to turn off our computers occasionally to have such exchanges. If we are to restore democracy in America, we will have to get out amongst 'em and engage in it. I believe our arguments are persuasive, but we have to present them in person to the people who don't already believe us.

http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/01/the_counterrevo.html

What has gone wrong with our country...?

Paul Krugman: Where's the Apology?

"...Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things? "

Republican Congress monkeywrenching again

John Dean: The Leak of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson's Identity

Why Competing Congressional and Special Counsel Investigations Will Inevitably Cause Problems

" While Congressman Holt's resolution keeps needed pressure on the investigators, and raises public awareness of the issues, it may also have a baleful effect -- one that the sponsors may not have anticipated. The effect may be to invites abuses by Congress...To see how this might occur, it's necessary to review some history. An couple of examples will make the point..."

Destroying our reputation

Boston Globe: Hostility grows over US stance

"In much of the world beyond Europe, anti-Americanism is growing at an alarming and corrosive rate. President Bush seemed genuinely shocked when he heard this from moderate Muslim leaders in Bali last October. In visits to four Muslim countries last year I came away equally shocked at how the high regard in which the United States was once held is slipping away, even among those who are still our friends. Whether it be Cairo's council on foreign relations or Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, the distrust of the United States is noticeably high..."

Brazen impropriety

Los Angeles Times: For Sale: One Congressman

"Even so, Tauzin breaks new ground by conducting what amounts to a public auction for his services in the private sector. Tauzin just rejected a deal worth in excess of $1 million a year to replace Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. And why not? The drug industry is apparently offering him an even more lucrative deal..."

Honing

Robert B. The Dead Center

"As we head into the next wave of primaries, the Democratic candidates should pay close attention to what Republicans have learned about winning elections. First, it is crucial to build a political movement that will endure after particular electoral contests. Second, in order for a presidency to be effective, it needs a movement that mobilizes Americans behind it. Finally, any political movement derives its durability from the clarity of its convictions. And there's no better way to clarify convictions than to hone them in political combat..."

Media consentration and the freedom of speech

John Nichols: "Exhibit A Against Media Concentration"

"CBS officials are still refusing to air a MoveOn.org Voter Fund commercial during Sunday's Super Bowl game because that the 30-second advertisement criticizes President Bush's fiscal policies. There is no question that the network's determination to censor critics of the president damages the political discourse. But the network has not exactly silenced dissent. In fact, CBS's heavy-handed tactics are fueling an outpouring of grassroots anger over the dominance of communications in the United States by a handful of large media corporations. More than 400,000 Americans have contacted CBS to complain already, and the numbers are mounting hourly..."

Lieberman

Michael Kinsley: Never Say Die

"A. ...To withdraw now, because the going is tough, would betray everything I stand for. I can't let down my supporters in that way and still call myself "that krazy kick-ass comeback kid."

Q. Many people have been hoping you would stop calling yourself that anyway... "

Unequal under the law

Findlaw's Writ: California's Defeat of a State RLUIPA Bill -
The Growing Backlash Against Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Acts

" The RLUIPA formulation, whether federal or state, mocks the constitutional requirement of equality under the law. Two neighbors--one religious, the other a family--who buy plots of land on the same day, in the same zoned area, are treated unequally under the law. The religious landowner gets first-class treatment, while the neighbor is a second-class citizen who must accommodate his property, his dream, even his family to the religious landowner's desires..."

Wanted: The Truth

Daniel Ellsberg: Leak against this war

" After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year's Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army's 25th Division, moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles, when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around, ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing as well.

They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn't fire at them, because we would have been firing into our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved on.

About an hour later, the same thing happened again; this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by their tactics but by their performance.

One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.

Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: "By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?"

Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: "I've been thinking that ... all ... day." You couldn't miss the comparison if you'd gone to grade school in America. Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their own homes, blending into the local population after each attack.

I can't help but remember that afternoon as I read about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors - as we preferred to imagine - but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.

There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide "security" for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation - as in Vietnam - is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.

As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq - killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there - they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.

I served three US presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied - and continue to lie - as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam.

By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents.

I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can.

I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now - the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic results.

Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me.

Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.

? Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."

Their mistake: They're counting him out

>Boston Globe: Dean shows he's a survivor

"The media reduced Dean to a caricature. But Dean went back to voters, and his campaign went back to its donor base. Since Saturday night, Dean raised more than $600,000, according to the campaign website..."

The long haul

Newsday: Kerry Wins, But Race for Nomination Is Not Over

"... At some point after next week, counting actual delegates will become more important than who the pundits want to anoint as the favorite of the moment. And the field will narrow even more. It is becoming increasingly likely that March 2 - when New York, California, Ohio and 10 others will choose delegates in what is shaping up to be a virtual national primary - will be decisive"

Fantasies of Jesus

James Shapiro: There's Never Been a 'Passion' for the Truth

"The new story line dominated stage and screen Passions (one of the earliest films ever made was of this Passion) right up to, and even after, the Holocaust. It was an interpretation that Adolf Hitler singled out for praise when he attended a performance in Oberammergau, Germany, where Passion plays have been performed continuously since the 1600s. He applauded the way the Oberammergau Pilate stood out "like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry..."

Some perspective

Delegate Count Wednesday Jan 28

112 - Gov. Howard Dean
95 - Sen. John F. Kerry
36 - Sen. John Edwards
30 - Wesley Clark
25 - Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman
7 - Rep. Richard A. Gephardt
4 - Al Sharpton
2 - Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich
1 - Other

Steve Gilliard's News Blog

May the gods (especially Hygieia) be with you Steve. Good luck.

Impeachment is for Democrats only

Robert Scheer: Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress

"The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed Kay to set the record straight. The administration's systematic abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S. intelligence experts -- including several who quit in disgust -- have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?.."

Media Insiders: Distorting the news is just what they do so well

Susan Ager: Sometimes, shouting is presidential

"By the next morning, I began to hear that Dean had given an angry speech. Angry? A scary speech. Scary? I'm not a Deaniac. I'm not enthused about any of those guys. But I couldn't help but feel that the TV media in particular were winding that speech around his throat like a rope..."

The Revenge of the Monied Class

Paul Krugman: Red Ink Realities

"Even conservatives are starting to admit that George Bush isn't serious when he claims to be doing something about the exploding budget deficit. At best ? to borrow the already classic language of the State of the Union address ? his administration is engaged in deficit reduction-related program activities..."

Voluntary Participation

Also known as 'putting in the fix'.

Seattle Times: The ineffectiveness of mad-cow testing

"Since testing of so-called "downer" cows was the primary way to monitor for signs of bovine spongiform encephalopathy among the 36 million U.S. cows slaughtered every year, the ban eliminates a financial incentive for producers to take their sick or injured cattle to market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture should establish a more methodical monitoring system that covers a cross-section of the cattle industry and is not dependent on voluntary participation..."

Yes, Mr. President...er...Vice President

Financial Times: Cheney 'waged war' on Blair Iraq strategy

"Mr Cheney remained implacably opposed to the strategy even after George W. Bush, US president, addressed the UN on the importance of a multilateralist approach, according to a new biography of Mr Blair..."

Paying attention: Corruption, Lies and Greed

Geov Parrish: Think you know how 2004 will play out? Think again.

"Not only are all us taxpayers being robbed blind by Halliburton and its cronies, but Iraqis are struggling, after nine months, to live their daily lives: the economy in ruins, jobs nonexistent, inflation crippling, and basics like security, food, electricity, hospital supplies, clean water, and so on sporadic at best. That's a big, big reason so many don't want any part of a government "selected" by Washington. Under international law -- which global financiers respect, even if Bush et al. don't -- an occupying power cannot auction off a country's assets. Only an independent government can..."

Bad, very bad 'vision thing'

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: What Bush Sees

"The United States is today an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. In a couple of years, Bush the younger has succeeded in turning the international wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 into worldwide dislike, distrust and even hatred. With his Iraq vision collapsing around him, Bush is trying to dump his self-created mess on the United Nations, heretofore an object of contempt in his administration. And he is trying out a new vision?the moon and Mars..."

Appearance of a 'conflict of interest'

Ha-ha. The 800 lb. gorilla in the Supreme Court is the Felonious Five and their massive conflict of interest.

San Francisco Chronicle: Too close for comfort

"When a sitting judge, poised to hear a case involving a particular litigant, goes on a vacation with that litigant, reasonable people will question whether that judge can be a fair,'' Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont wrote to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, seeking to know if the court can disqualify a justice who refuses to withdraw from a case..."

Joe Lieberman claims to have "Joementum"

I think it resembles sky diving in some way.

Prediction - and yes, I'm prejudiced

But I might be right.

Dean
Kerry
Edwards
Clark

Lieberman drops out.

Dean or Kerry could swap places but since everyone of the "Kool Kids" has written off Dean, a strong second by him will reflect badly on Kerry.

Brace yourself for another terrorist tragedy

Bush's numbers are down.

Progressive Newswire: 52 Percent of Voters Don't Want to See Bush Re-Elected

"Meanwhile, a week after President Bush's State of the Union address, his approval rating has fallen to 50 percent from 54 percent in the last Newsweek Poll (1/8-9/04). Yet, a 52-percent majority of registered voters says it would not like to see him re-elected to a second term. Only 44 percent say they would like to see him re-elected, a four-point drop from the last Newsweek Poll. (Of that, 37% strongly want to see him re-elected, and 47% strongly do not). However, a large majority of voters (78%) says that it is very likely (40%) or somewhat likely (38%) that Bush will in fact be re- elected to a second term in office. Only 10 percent believe it is not too likely or not at all likely (10%)..."

Progressive Newswire: 52 Percent of Voters Don't Want to See Bush Re-Elected

"Meanwhile, a week after President Bush's State of the Union address, his approval rating has fallen to 50 percent from 54 percent in the last Newsweek Poll (1/8-9/04). Yet, a 52-percent majority of registered voters says it would not like to see him re-elected to a second term. Only 44 percent say they would like to see him re-elected, a four-point drop from the last Newsweek Poll. (Of that, 37% strongly want to see him re-elected, and 47% strongly do not). However, a large majority of voters (78%) says that it is very likely (40%) or somewhat likely (38%) that Bush will in fact be re- elected to a second term in office. Only 10 percent believe it is not too likely or not at all likely (10%)..."

The Comeback Kid

Richard Blow: Primetime Dean

"Perhaps the most important event came first, a two-hour New Hampshire debate starting at 8 p.m. It wasn't nationally televised, but for New Hampshire voters, it was must-see TV. Viewers saw a drastically different Howard Dean than the intense, angrily anti-Bush candidate of the past year. Dean was mild-mannered, substantive and gracious, going out of his way to compliment his opponents. When questioner Brit Hume asked about his "moment of excitement," Dean responded that he had "a passion for social justice." And he introduced a line that he'd repeat almost verbatim in his ABC interview: "I'm not a perfect person," he said. "I have my warts... I wear suits that are cheap..."

Blistering

International Herald Tribune: The perils of online voting

"Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report this week, concluding that the program should be halted. These four are the only members of a 10-member advisory committee to issue a report on the program. Their findings make it clear that the potential for hackers to steal votes or otherwise subvert elections electronically is too high. Congress should suspend the program..."

The Convoluted Logic of Tom

Ira Chernus: Thomas Friedman Wants a Democrat Who Can Win World War III

"Does that mean letting the Iraqi people elect their own leaders? Gosh, no. That's a bad idea, says Tom, and if you want free elections in Iraq you must be supporting the forces of violent intolerance..."

Not yet Democrats, but definitely not Republican

Seattle Times: The I's have it in New Hampshire

"Sara Townsend was the Republican majority whip in the New Hampshire Legislature for 17 years, so you'd think she would have little to do on primary day -- other than watch the Democrats duke it out. On the contrary, she is very much involved. Townsend is a Republican no more. She left the party in disgust a few years ago and now calls herself an independent..."

Those filthy socialist Canadians

Mercury News: State must push to get cheaper prescription drugs

"California is looking at a state budget proposal that calls for $3 billion in painful health care cuts. At the same time, the state is projecting that it will pay nearly $4 billion to U.S. pharmaceutical companies for prescription drugs for its Medi-Cal program.

Yet Canadians who buy their prescription drugs from the very same pharmaceutical companies pay 40 percent less than Californians. That's a big chunk of change..."

On Dean

Ralph T. Holhut: Looking back at Iowa, looking ahead at New Hampshire

"Dean failed to accept the fact that before you can get elected by the people you have to be selected by the crowd in charge," wrote Smith. "You don't just run for president in the Democratic Party (unless you're a Sharpton or Kucinich doomed from the start); you ask permission nicely just like Clinton did. Show the elite that you want to come to Washington to serve them, not lead others. . . . It's bad enough when a Georgia peanut farmer like Carter tries it, but Dean came out of the establishment himself so his crime was worse: betrayal rather than naivete. And he paid the price.

"It's not political. Washington is a place where more things are done illegally or under the table than just about anywhere in the world. Where your laws are made - and broken - as Mark Russell used to say. And it's the world's most powerful private club. If you want to get ahead here the first thing you've got to do is shut your mouth. And show you respect the people who really run the place. Dean didn't do that..."

Russ Baker: The Phony Dean 'Meltdown'

"As for Dean, one doesn't need to take sides to see that the treatment of this man is unbecoming of the media. It's also going to be seen in retrospect as colossally one-sided, not in any way balanced by comparable scrutiny or criticism of his rivals.

If anything, this affair is a kind of test. Dean seems too tough a customer to back out after such a setback. And the fact remains that he essentially still holds exactly the same constituency he did before. If his supporters keep their eye on the ball, if Dean refuses to be distracted or rattled, and if the media somehow manage to restrain their headlong rush into tabloid-land, this country may yet have a meaningful conversation on what really matters..."

We May Have Dean to Kick Around

"Perhaps the propensity toward hysteria and overheated rhetoric belongs to the media, not to Dean..."

Molly Ivins: Ain't democracy grand? Wild Iowa caucus results put pundits in their place

"I have long cherished a line from Max Frankel, editor of The New York Times, concerning Bill Clinton: "He came from nowhere, and nobody had ever heard of him." Clinton, like Dean, had been a governor for 10 years when he ran, yet Maureen Dowd recently wrote, "(Dean) comes from nowhere and wants to lead the world." The subtext here is: "Well we never heard of him. He's not one of us. We never see him at the best Washington dinner parties, so who does he think he is?..."

Lauren Gelman: Does Howard Dean's Third-Place Finish in Iowa Rebut the "Internet Election" Concept? Don't Count on It.

"We have yet to experience the true "Internet Election." In that election, the Internet will not simply be a tool for electioneering. Rather, the Internet's design will itself be a prototype for democratic discourse and decisionmaking -- as I will explain..."

Touch Screen Madness

Paul Krugman: Democracy at Risk

"Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory ? but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?.."

Moral and Intellectual Dry Hole

John Chuckman: President From Podunk Drilling Inc.

"Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.

Bush's halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O'Neill has now supplied that in spades..."

Daddy knows best. So, shut up!

George Lakoff: The Hidden State of the Union

"The people we call conservatives and progressives think about politics almost exclusively in terms of one of these two models. But everyone has both models, either actively or passively. Any liberal who can understand a John Wayne movie is using the strict-father model, at least passively. Any conservative who understands The Bill Cosby Show is using the nurturing parent model...."

What?! And give up our oil leases?

Robert Scheer: Why not allow Iraqis to govern themselves?

"With the stated reasons for the U.S. invasion -- the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his ties to Al-Qaida -- now a proven fraud, the Bush administration was left with one defense: It was bringing democracy to this corner of the Mideast. If we now fail to promptly return full sovereignty to the Iraqis, inconvenient as that outcome may be, the invasion will stand exposed as nothing more than old-fashioned imperial plunder of the region's oil riches -- and the continued occupation could devolve into civil war..."

They want to Rule not govern

John Dean: The U.S. Supreme Court and The Imperial Presidency -- How President Bush Is Testing the Limits of His Presidential Powers

Can the President of the United States arrest any American he suspects of being a terrorist and toss him in a military brig, deny him a lawyer, omit to bring any charges against him -- yet indefinitely keep him imprisoned nonetheless?

Can the President kidnap foreigners charged with violating federal law, and bring them to the United States to stand trial? How about Osama bin Laden, for starters?

These are only a few of the issues raised by cases now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that will examine the limits of presidential powers. As David Savage, the legal writer for the Los Angeles Times, has noted, this is a remarkable collection of cases.

"[T]he justices have voted to take up five cases that test the president's power to act alone and without interference from Congress or the courts," Savage explains. The description of these cases, as Savage has ably summarized them, is startling: "They involve imprisoning foreign fighters at overseas bases, holding American citizens without charges in military brigs, preserving the secrecy of White House meetings, enforcing free-trade treaties despite environmental concerns, and abducting foreigners charged with U.S. crimes."

What the Supreme Court has placed on its agenda, in short, is the Imperial Presidency -- that is, the Presidency in which the Executive largely acts alone, pushing the Constitution to the limits and beyond. And how the Justices deal with this overwhelmingly important topic could affect the reelection prospects of the Bush presidency, for, as David Savage notes, at least four of the five rulings are anticipated to be handed down during the summer of 2004 -- right in the middle of the presidential campaign.

The High Court and Nixon's Imperial Presidency

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Imperial Presidency gave the term its currency. He traces its growth from George Washington to Richard Nixon, showing how a presidency never contemplated by the founders has evolved. As a basis for their authority, presidents typically cited their role as commander-in-chief -- an undefined constitutional term -- and "inherited powers" other presidents had used before them.

After Nixon pushed the presidential powers even further than past presidents had, both the Congress and Supreme Court acted to curtail his activities. In the name of protecting national security, Nixon wanted to be able to wiretap without the approval of a judge. The authority for this power? Before the Court of Appeals, Nixon relied on a vague "historical power of the sovereign to preserve itself" and "the inherent power of the President to safeguard the security of the nation."

Later, arguing the issue before the Supreme Court, the government got even more vague -- just loosely using the national security contention. In the end, the Court -- in the ironically named case United States v. United States Court for the Eastern District of Michigan (which became known as the Keith Case) -- said no. Joining the opinion were all of Nixon's own appointees -- except William Rehnquist, who recused himself.

In another Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, Nixon also tried, but failed to get the Supreme Court to extend Executive powers. Then, Nixon's government sought an order blocking publication of the Pentagon Papers. It claimed the release of the classified documents that had been leaked to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers, could harm national security. Again, Nixon lost.

Then, in United States v. Nixon, Nixon resisted turning over to the Watergate Special Prosecutor his taped conversations. He asserted his implied authority to invoke "executive privilege." But once again, he lost: It was the Supreme Court's unanimous decision that the privilege did not protect the tapes, when a grand jury had sought the information. This ruling, of course, ended Nixon's presidency.

After Nixon had departed, the Supreme Court also addressed Nixon's effort to impound federal funds -- to not spend money that Congress had appropriated. Nixon claimed he was only doing as his predecessors had done (albeit a bit more aggressively than they had). But the Court again unanimously ruled against him. It held that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority.

In short, at the zenith of the Imperial Presidency era, the Supreme Court consistently ruled in such a way as to pull the presidency back into Constitutional balance with the other branches. Its rulings were wise, for the alternative would have been to allow presidential power to burgeon, at the expense of the balance of power with the Legislative and Judicial branches.

Bush's Imperial Presidency?

Not inaccurately, the Bush presidency has been called imperial, in Schlesinger's sense. The evidence? Its "preemptive" and "preventive" military policy, its contentions that it can go to war regardless of whether Congress approves, its policies calling for American world domination, and its unprecedented blending of national security policy and domestic law enforcement. In my view, these policies and positions not only easily establish the Bush presidency as imperial, they also rank it beyond anything in the annals of the modern American presidency. This may be the most imperial Presidency our history has yet seen.

I've spoken with Arthur Schlesinger about it -- asking him if he thought the Bush presidency fit his description of an imperial presidency. In response, he chuckled, and said, "I'd certainly say this is an imperial presidency."

The fact that five cases currently before the Supreme Court address the question of presidential powers -- and whether or not the Bush presidency has exceeded them -- speaks for itself. Bush has had almost twice as many such cases before the Court as Nixon had, in half the time.

The new level of exertion of presidential authority is a combination of the circumstances following 9/11, the war on terrorism, and Vice President Dick Cheney's long held views on executive power. Accordingly, these are hardly small issues with this presidency. In fact, they are precisely the issues that will be an integral part of the debate during the presidential campaign.

Democrats, and many Republicans, believe that Bush and Cheney have pushed too far, taken too many liberties, and far exceeded the constitutional boundaries -- many of them defined by these cases. For that reason, it is difficult to suggest a collection of cases, over our history, that were more likely to have a political impact -- whichever way the Supreme Court rules.

Stated more bluntly: Rulings for Bush will help him politically. Conversely, holdings against him will show a president who is operating outside the Constitution.

Will the Supreme Court Place Checks on the Bush Presidency?

Predicting Supreme Court rulings is a tricky business. Yet it is clear that the current Court is more center-to-conservative than the Court that checked Nixon's activity. And when members of the Court start thinking about leaving the high bench -- and several on this Court have been mulling that for some time -- they also think about who will be in the White House to select their successor.

Without dissecting the legal matters at issue in each of these cases -- all with their own complexes and nuances -- at this time, it is not possible to know how the Court will rule. Some pundits claim, however, that the recent ruling of the Court not to review the case of Center for National Security Studies v. Justice Department is a favorable omen for the Administration.

There, the court rejected a petition, joined by twenty-three news organizations, that it should hear a high profile case involving First Amendment and Freedom of Information Act issues. The result was to allow the government -- specifically, the Justice Department -- to continue to withhold the names and other details about the hundreds of Muslims and other Middle Eastern men rounded up, and detained (even abused, according to the Justice Department's Inspector General's report) after 9/11.

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The pundits have suggested that this denial of review shows that the Bush administration is correct to be confident that it will win the executive power cases before the Court. But frankly, I don't believe anything can be read into a decision of the Supreme Court not to review any case, even this one.

For one thing, the issues in Center for National Security Studies are quite distinct from the issues in the other pending executive authority cases. Second, as with virtually all denials of review, no one outside the Court can really understand why Justices turned down the case. Those pundits who claim otherwise are thus off the mark.

The Executive Power Cases the Court Will Hear Soon

As I noted at the start of this column, it has been three decades since the Court will have tackled such important presidential power questions -- with such potential political implications for a presidential race. For that reason, the five cases that raise these questions should be on the radar screen of all president -- and Supreme Court -- watchers.

The cases are:

o Sealed Case
. A case so secret it does not appear on the Court's docket, and the Solicitor General simply refers to it as "this matter ? that is required to be kept under seal." In fact, it is not all that secret. It involves Mohamed Kamel Baellahouel, who wants the Court to rule on whether he was improperly secretly jailed. The government want to argue its case in secret. But some twenty news organizations are opposing this extreme secrecy.

o Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
. This case raises the rights of an American citizen -- Yaser Hamdi -- who was captured overseas and held in the United States as an "enemy combatant." Hamdi was arrested in Afghanistan.

o Rasul v. Bush
, and Al Odah v. United States. These cases address the habeas corpus rights of aliens detained at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The government is maintaining that these aliens do not have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. federal courts.

o Padilla v. Rumsfeld
. This case involves Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who is being held indefinitely, in a military prison, as an "enemy combatant." He was arrested when deplaning in Chicago. (Thus, his case may be treated differently from that of Hamdi, who was arrested abroad, in Afghanistan.) The Second Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, held that Padilla's detention violated the Non-Detention Act of 1971, which asserts that no citizens may be held by the federal government "except pursuant to an act of Congress." The Government is appealing, claiming that the President has power to unilaterally cause such detentions to occur.

o Cheney v. Judicial Watch and Sierra Club
. This case involves the right of the vice president (and, by implication, of the president) to refuse to turn over documents in a civil lawsuit. The suit seeks to determine if Cheney violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (the law that forced First Lady Hillary Clinton to open up her sessions on health care).

Given the importance of all of these cases (with their implications), I've got them on my docket, and plan to follow them in the coming weeks and months.

Radical vs. The Center

Paul Krugman: Who Gets It?

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.

Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.

But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness ? shared, we now know, by General Clark ? to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" ? as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents ? a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless ? but optimistic! ? Moon-base program.)

But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration ? a much larger group than you might think ? are afraid to give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical ? which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical ? and that Mr. Bush is.

Compelling Reason No. 99

Elaine Kamarck: This Guy Can Rock the White House

" But the most compelling reason to support Dean is that only he can change the nature of the political game. No Democrat will win unless he can make the country see through Bush, and Dean has been so good at this that by last fall all the other candidates were mimicking his outrage. .."

For Real

John Nichols: Dean's D.C. votes show he's for real

"Dean easily outdistanced other candidates who put more time and energy into the D.C. contest. And he showed strength across a city where African-American voters form a substantial majority, offering him an opportunity to counter the claims that he lacks the record and the style to appeal beyond his initial base of support among young, white, middle-class activists. Dean made note of that fact in a call Tuesday night to a gathering of several hundred enthusiastic supporters at the Lucky Bar in northwest Washington. Echoing the Rev. Jesse Jackson's campaign theme from insurgent races for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, Dean told his cheering backers, "We're going to build a rainbow coalition to take over this country for the people who own it..."

We are so fucked

But then, many of us already knew that.

Sydney Morning Herald: Surreal moments serving a mythological president

"Mr O'Neill's story, backed up by thousands of pages of documents, is the first inside account by a top Bush Administration official to strip away the carefully crafted mythology surrounding Mr Bush as a "can-do" president. It reveals what many long suspected, that Mr Bush is often disengaged from policy debates, lacks intellectual rigour, runs on gut instinct and is heavily influenced by conservative ideological advisers..."

Joe Conason: O'Neill tells all, and it's not pretty

"...Indeed, nobody at the White House has accused Mr. O?Neill of lying, so far. That would be hard to say about a man who was fired for his excessive bluntness."

Arianna Huffington: The Ultimate Insider

"Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting harder by the day. Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing, diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: The country is being governed not by the genial figurehead now running toward the center in hopes of re-election, but by a band of out and out fanatics...."

Sometimes the easy thing isn't the right thing

Seattle Times: Why Internet voting is bad for democracy

" If those people won't go out to vote, say civic do-gooders, then bring the vote to them. Let people vote from the comfort of their TV room. The more people who vote, they contend, the stronger the democracy. Making the procedure as simple as choosing a cable channel will go far in reversing the troubling decline in voter participation. And what could be easier than voting over the Internet?

Nothing is easier -- for the wired, that is. But isn't voting supposed to be a communal activity? What's next, Thanksgiving dinners conducted via Instant Messenger?..."

Election year bon-bon

Philadelphia Inquirer: Bush proposal may worsen the U.S. immigration crisis

"Not only will the guest worker amnesty not reduce illegal immigration; it's certain to increase it, just as the 1986 amnesty of 2.7 million illegal aliens did. (It, too, had been promoted as the solution to this problem.) Aliens will see ever clearer incentives to violate our laws and enter illegally..."

Dangerous Leaky Logic

Los Angeles Times:Dangerous Veil of Secrecy

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday bought the Bush administration's leaky logic on terrorism, tacitly endorsing secret detentions of hundreds of suspects after the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, by embracing the ends-justify-means reasoning in this case, the justices set a dangerous precedent as they ponder other key challenges to the administration's anti-terror policies before them this term..."

Zellum

Real Crooks

Niagara Falls Reporter: Real Crooks Walk, Donate to G.O.P.

By Bill Gallagher

"They must understand there will be consequences." -- Russell Mokhiber, Editor, Corporate Crime Reporter.

DETROIT -- They kill and cause illnesses and suffering for millions of people. They do great harm to the water we drink and the air we breathe.

They steal and plunder and routinely rob the American taxpayers. They shamelessly exploit the young and the poor, stripping them of their dignity and using human beings like cheap commodities. Their crimes are often unreported and, when they are caught, they rarely face serious consequences.

Corporate criminals in the United States get away with murder, sometimes literally. When they steal from their shareholders or the public treasury, it seems the more outrageous the thievery, the more likely the culprits are to avoid prosecution.

The crimes run the whole spectrum of violence and deception. Denials and cover-ups supported by armies of corporate lawyers form the shields of dishonor to protect the dirty deeds and evil-doers.

No corporate officer really paid a price for Union Carbide's Bhopal, India, disaster in 1984. Poison gas at an agrochemical plant leaked, killing 8,000 people and leaving 150,000 more with permanent and debilitating injuries. The company put the plant there to take advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental and safety standards.

What about the tobacco and lead-additive industry executives who produced products they knew were deadly and for decades got away with it as millions died? Sure, a few fines and court settlements, but did anyone ever go to jail in the death-for-profit game?

Consider General Motors, Standard Oil of California and the Firestone Tire Company conspiring to derail environmentally friendly rapid rail systems in Los Angeles and more than 100 U.S. cities. Back in 1949, the companies were convicted and fined $5,000 each. Boy, was that a deterrent. They are still laughing about it in Detroit-area country clubs.

Archer Daniels Midland Company, the huge agribusiness operation, got caught red-handed fixing prices on lysine and citric acid. Lysine is an amino acid used by farmers as a food additive for livestock. Citric acid is a flavor additive used in soft drinks, processed foods and pharmaceutical and cosmetics products.

The Justice Department slapped the company with a $100 million fine, the largest criminal antitrust fine ever at the time. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno boasted, "If you engage in collusive behavior that robs U.S. consumers, there will be vigorous investigation and tough, tough penalties."

Let's see. In 1996, when the fine was levied, citric acid was a $1.2 billion-a-year industry worldwide, lysine $600 million a year. Do the math. The boys at ADM cheat the consumers for decades, reap billions in ill-gotten gains, and they use their shareholders' money to pay the one-time fine.

Nobody faces criminal responsibility and certainly nobody will spend a single day in jail for the monumental heist.

Why not send the swine who cooked up the price-fixing scheme to prison? Why not impose the corporate death penalty and yank ADM's corporate charter and dissolve the crooked company?

Enter Niagara Falls native Russell Mokhiber, editor of "Corporate Crime Reporter" and a fearless