IN-DEPTH REPORTS

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Auto industry needs help; here's how
John Beckett, Opinion Artillery
11/17/08 -- The General Motor Proving Grounds are about 40 miles from Detroit, nestled among exurban subdivisions and small farms, and enclosed by a high fence that traces the irregular outline of the large complex, standing guard between it and the two-lane roads that wind around it. As you drive these roads, you can catch glimpses, through or over the fence, of GM cars that aren't yet on the market zipping around curves and embankments. On a sunny, warm day it makes you feel like singing one of those great old car songs by the Beach Boys, like I Get Around or Little Deuce Coupe.

But the only place GM -- and Ford and Chrysler -- are getting around to these days is Congress, where they're asking for another $25 billion loan. ...

Conservatives: First 4 letters say it all
I have finally figured out what’s wrong with conservatives. My explanation is not revolutionary, and I have no explanation for why it took me so long to come up with it except that sometimes it’s easy to think that things can’t be as simple as they seem. So I got hung up on underlying causes and contributing factors and the like when the real explanation was staring me in the face: Conservatives are people who want to live in the past – except with all the conveniences modern living affords.

Chilling comments seem to run in Cheney family
Ever since reading Jaws 33 years ago, I’ve thought of summer as an especially good time of year to curl up at the beach, or beside the swimming pool, or on the deck, with something frightening. I found such a read in an unexpected place: a transcript of a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion, “Assessing U.S. Policy Toward Iran.” Even though it is not a work of fiction, much less a book, it is plenty scary. And even though it doesn’t feature a large and hungry shark, it features a character every bit as frightening: Liz Cheney, daughter of the Vice President, who seems to have a great thirst for Middle Eastern blood.  

Pounding down our Bourbon (Street)
What happened to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck – and before and after – was more than a tragedy. It should be a clarion call to Americans to reassert their rightful control over a government that is failing its citizens dangerously, not only in Iraq but in homeland security  – in the truest sense of the words.

Take nothing for granted
The democracy that Abraham Lincoln and so many others died to save has become the government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation. The most powerful of those corporations, and the most threatening to not only American democracy but to the people of the world, is the oil business.

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Here's how to help auto biz
John Beckett, Opinion Artillery
11/16/08 -- The General Motor Proving Grounds are about 40 miles from Detroit, nestled among exurban subdivisions and small farms, and enclosed by a high fence that traces the irregular outline of the large complex, standing guard between it and the two-lane roads that wind around it. As you drive these roads, you can catch glimpses, through or over the fence, of GM cars that aren't yet on the market zipping around curves and embankments. On a sunny, warm day it makes you feel like singing one of those great old car songs by the Beach Boys, like I Get Around.

But the only place GM -- and Ford and Chrysler -- are getting around to these days is Congress, where they're asking for another $25 billion loan. That's in addition to $25 billion for developing alternative energy vehicles that Congress has promised but the Bush administration has failed to actually deliver yet.

Yet while the automakers have hats in hands and the support of Democrats, most Republicans are reluctant to give them just 3.5% of the $700 billion they gave the banking industry.                                                                       Photo: GM

President George W. Bush opposes lending the auto firms more money and instead would like to free up the first $25 billion so automakers can use it right away to shore up their day-to-day operations.

That's a typical "stay the course" reaction from a president with the vision of a bat. If carmakers are to survive long-term they need to start making smaller, more fuel-efficient cars right away, and anything that lets them continue business as usual is bad business, and bad government.

But some Republican senators are just as unfriendly toward the auto business as Bush, who throughout his presidency has shown little concern for manufacturing in general and automakers in particular. One has to wonder how much of their animosity is directed at the staunchly Democratic United Auto Workers union, and one suspects that Bush would love to hammer the UAW as a parting gift to his backers.

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) said, "Companies fail everyday and others take their place. I think this (loan) is a road we should not go down. They're not building the right products. They've got good workers but I don't believe they've got good management. They don't innovate. They're a dinosaur in a sense."

He's right in one sense. U.S. automakers have become dinosaur-like. But they haven't done it without help from Congress, which has for decades compounded the auto firms' myopia by failing to raise mileage standards, diluting what standards it did enact, and even providing tax breaks that made SUVs and light trucks more affordable.

While Congress and the car-makers colluded on such short-sighted policy -- short-sighted because anyone with a lick of sense could see the end of the petroleum era and global warming coming like a freight train at least five years ago -- Europe, and even American cars built for the European market, were adapting.

So, having been a partner in the crime perpetrated by the auto business, it seems only right that Congress now do something to help make things right.

Consider: The banking industry employs 2 million people. As Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, said, troubled insurance giant American International Group, which received a revised $150 billion bailout last week, employs 100,000 workers around the globe. GM, Ford, and Chrysler LLC employ 250,000 in the United States and support about 5 million jobs in the nation. In fact, one of every 12 jobs in the country is tied to the auto industry.

Obviously, the banking and auto industries can't be compared purely on their numbers of workers. But is it really smart, let alone fair, to lend a business with half the number of employees nearly 30 times as much? Especially when the products offered by both industries are, at the moment, crap?

A bill to rescue GM, Chrysler and Ford with emergency loans is to be taken up in the Senate beginning today. Its passage is far from certain. Some senators object to government intervention in industry for fear that lending one business billions will prompt other businesses to line up for similar loans. And some economists argue that forcing automakers to reorganize under bankruptcy law would result in a leaner but more competitive U.S. auto industry.

Both arguments are wrong.

First of all, the auto business isn't just any business. There are auto plants throughout the country, and there are thousands of other smaller plants across the country that make and supply parts to the Big Three. There also are dealerships, true local, Main Street businesses that already are expiring at the rate of mosquitoes flying at windshield-level over a freeway on a muggy summer night. In an economy already bleeding jobs, the ripple effect of an auto industry collapse would be catastrophic.

"Our model estimates that a complete shutdown of Detroit three U.S. production would have a major impact on the U.S. economy in terms of lost wages, reductions in social security receipts, personal income taxes paid, and an increase in transfer payments," said Sean McAlinden, CAR's chief economist."The government stands to lose $60 billion in the first year alone, and the three-year total is well over $156 billion."

In that light, a $50 billion government investment doesn't sound so bad. And it needn't be seen as a precedent for other industries to come begging, because the failure of other businesses wouldn't have such a huge impact.

As for letting market principles beget a leaner auto industry through bankruptcy, pardon me if I'm a little leery of market principles at the moment. Besides, we can't afford the time that would take. As Daniel Gross writes in Newsweek, "Auto parts supplier Delphi filed for Chapter 11 in October 2005, and still languishes there." And while bankruptcy is a viable option for some businesses, it wouldn't be so hot for the auto business. When you shop for a new car that you plan to own for a few years, you want to know that the manufacturer is going to be around long enough to honor its warranty. 

Here's what our government could, but almost undoubtedly won't do to truly help the auto industry:

Robert Hahn and Peter Passell propose in the Wall Street Journal, "Since a big fiscal-stimulus package for fighting the recession -- some combination of tax cuts, extended unemployment compensation, infrastructure grants and assistance to states -- is coming soon, why not stimulate consumers to buy cars? Why not offer eye-popping rebates -- say, $3,000 -- for a limited time to buyers of cars and light trucks?"

In fact, car companies and their dealers already are offering eye-popping deals worth more than $3,000, but tax rebates for buying cars could help in four ways: they would give consumers another reason to buy new cars; at least some of the rebate money would circulate, providing some degree of stimulus to the economy; the auto companies and dealers would get some of the money they so desperately need in the short term, and auto workers -- at least most of them -- would continue to have jobs.

The second thing Congress should do is have the government buy new cars. Allocate a few billion to various national departments and to smaller units of government -- state, county, city, etc. -- to replace aging vehicles.

As with the rebates, governmental units would have a limited time to take advantage of the program so that it wouldn't become an industry entitlement. It would be a short-term stimulant with the same potentially sound impacts on the economy in general and the auto business in particular as rebates. And it would have the beneficial side effect of allowing cash-strapped governments to purchase cars and trucks that, if Detroit can be believed about anything, should be at least somewhat safer and more fuel-efficient than older models.

To prevent angering other car-making countries, both these steps might have to apply to all cars, not just American ones. But because the auto business has become so multinational, U.S. car-makers would reap at least some of the rewards. By themselves, these two steps might not save the domestic auto industry. As Ann Arbor's David Cole, head of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), says, the Big Three may have to shrink to the Big Two before all is said and done.

But what the American auto industry most needs right now is to sell enough cars to hold on until it can re-tool and start putting greener cars on dealers' lots. It needs the $25 billion already promised it, and it may require the proposed $25 billion loan, too -- although some of that money could be delivered through tax rebates and government purchases.

The auto industry needs one more chance, and Congress needs to give it that chance.

Congress -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- aren't about to merely hand the Big Three another $25 billion. Nancy Pelosi is calling for restructuring the industry and limiting executive salaries, and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, says that top execs of the Big Three may have to resign.

With such steps on the table, why not enact the tax rebates and government purchase plan as part of whatever bailout plan is approved? This way, some individual car buyers and some government agencies would benefit, not to mention the millions of workers who would keep their jobs at least a little longer, and the government agencies that would have to provide those workers with services if they lost those jobs -- and the government lost their tax payments.

If all this isn't enough to save the auto industry, then bankruptcy could be tried.But before taking that desperate route, why not try rebates, government purchasing, and a second loan of $25 billion or less? Certainly, it would be better than the pig in the poke Congress bought with its $700 million financial bailout, not to mention considerably cheaper.


Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Conservatives: First 4 letters say it all I have finally figured out what’s wrong with conservatives. My explanation is not revolutionary, and I have no explanation for why it took me so long to come up with it except that sometimes it’s easy to think that things can’t be as simple as they seem. So I got hung up on underlying causes and contributing factors and the like when the real explanation was staring me in the face: Conservatives are people who want to live in the past – except with all the conveniences modern living affords. How far in the past probably varies from individual to individual, but generally speaking, conservatives would like to turn the clock back to at least the1950s. They regard the Sixties, an era beloved by most liberals and at least recognized by most people for its positive influences on civil rights, as a time not only best forgotten but, even better, wiped from the pages of history. Ann Coulter                               As for today, it's particularly worth noting that it is the Bush administration’s © Janet Mayer / Photorazzi      excessive spending that particularly irritates manyconservatives. The war in Iraq certainly doesn’t bother them, nor does the erosion of civil liberties here at home, or the administration’s approval of torture as a legitimate form  of “interrogation.” Conservatives, it would seem, are very much attuned to the literal bottom line – in other words, money, and more specifically, their money. Which may explain why Human Events, one of the leading conservative publications in both its magazine and its Web forms, is so dedicated to helping readers part with their money. In order to make a detailed study of conservative thought, I subscribed to HumanEvents.com for two months. I do not pretend that my study was scientific, even though I did survey other conservative sites such as the Weekly Standard from time to time. What I found was that the writing at organizations such as the Heritage Foundation is more scholarly, that their reports are couched in more academic terms than are those at Human Events, but that all in all they are driven by the same turn-back-the-clock philosophy. I decided to focus on Human Events for several reasons. First, because its language seemed more accessible than, say, National Review, I hoped it might help me understand why the conservative philosophy appeals to average Americans. Second, its slogan – “Leading the Conservative Movement since 1944" – seemed to indicate both longevity and prominence in conservative thinking. Thirdly, Human Events has as regular contributors people like Ann Coulter, Oliver North and Patrick Buchanan, names that are certainly recognizable to the person in the street. One thing I quickly discovered was that the folks at Human Events are not at all conservative about trying to get us to part with our money. Of the plethora of emails that Human Events sent my way, perhaps one-third were like this one that arrived on Sunday, July 6, with a Subject heading of  “The shocking cure Ronald Regan used for his cancer”: President Reagan refused America's outdated cancer treatments. Instead, like other celebrities and European royalty, President Reagan went to Germany to cure his cancer. Americans would be shocked if they knew that President Reagan, while still in the White House, turned his back on American cancer treatments. He secretly went to a German cancer clinic, got rid of his cancer, and lived another 19 years. Why did he choose Germany? Because German cancer doctors are the best - thanks to breakthrough treatments the American cancer establishment calls "quackery." No wonder President Reagan and other celebrities such as Liz Taylor, Suzanne Somers, Anthony Quinn, and European royalty chose Germany's kinder, gentler treatments. Surprisingly, these treatments cost 10 cents on the dollar compared to America's dreadful treatments. As one of Germany's top doctors said, "Doctors give chemo, chemo, chemo, and patients die, die, die." That describes American cancer treatments. German doctors use a whole new way with NO hair loss, NO nausea, and NO disfiguring surgeries. Click here for proof of the German cancer breakthrough You'll see a complete description of the breakthrough including the story of a woman who said "NO!" to surgery that would've disfigured her face. She was completely cured without chemotherapy or surgery. Click here and see for yourself exactly what the German cancer breakthrough is, why it works so well, and where the celebrities go to get rid of their cancer.     This message was preceded by this disclaimer: “Below please find a special message from one of our advertisers, Cancer Defeated. From time to time, we receive opportunities we believe you as a valued customer may want to know about. Please note that the following message does not necessarily reflect the editorial positions of Human Events.” Which set me to wondering which parts of the message might have conflicted with Human Events' editorial positions. The equating of Reagan to royalty couldn’t have been it considering Reagan’s place in the conservative firmament (the Heritage Foundation even has a little feature called "What World Reagan Do?"). Perhaps it was the reference to German cancer treatment costing “10 cents on the dollar compared to America's dreadful treatments” since this could lead to the realization that one reason German health care is cheaper than American is that Germany has had universal health care, of one sort or another, for about 150 years. Luckily, I didn’t have to ponder this question for long. On Thursday, July 24, the Human Events deposit in my Inbox was headed, “Straight talk about universal healthcare.” Here’s some of that straight talk: Big government making you sick? Get the Washington health bureaucrats and fitness freaks out of your life forever! The medical community's most outspoken crusader against the "nanny state" shows you how to enjoy your best health ever -- by ignoring Big Government's advice. Say good-bye to turkey burgers and tofu... forcing gallons of water down your throat... and exercising until you can hardly breathe. Discover how to live long and love every minute of it... Straight talk about universal healthcare This November, as in all election years, there are important issues at stake. One of them is the issue of socialized medicine or, to use the Democrats' latest euphemism for it, "universal healthcare." Universal disaster is more like it. The Dems do their best to put a positive, humanitarian spin on the idea, but the long-term ramifications would be devastating. The Democrats would have you believe that conservatives who are against universal healthcare take this stance because they are mean-spirited and compassionless. Naturally, this isn't the case. And it's hardly how I feel. I am against universal healthcare because I believe it will create one of the most intrusive government bureaucracies since the Internal Revenue Service, and it will impinge heavily on the individual freedoms of all American citizens. ... This illuminating missive, preceded by the requisite disclaimer, was signed by William Campbell Douglass II, M.D. A little research revealed that Dr. Douglass writes the medical newsletter, Real Health Breakthroughs, and the E-letter, Daily Dose. He also is the author of, as one website featuring his work says, “numerous books and monographs.” Numerous, indeed. Dr. Douglass is ubiquitous on the web. Articles by him, or touting his books and articles, made up a truly stunning 70 percent of the first six pages of my Google search for his name. A little more research showed that the good doctor has some rather unorthodox opinions. As Roger Mason writes at youngagain.org: Let's look at some of his rantings: "Say no to Vegetarians" because they are sicklier, more irregular, weaker, have poor sex lives and die earlier. Of course the facts prove exactly the opposite is true and vegetarians get far less diseases of all kinds and live longer. He also tells you fiber in your diet is not only useless (meat and animal products have no fiber) but some fibers "can trigger precancerous growths". He says coffee is, "one of nature's healthiest miracles". ... You should smoke cigars too, as cigars have many health advantages such as staying slim, mental alertness, avoiding addictions (!) and lessening mental and brain disease. ... He goes on to say that high fat diets don't cause breast cancer despite the endless studies that prove high fat diets are THE main cause of this plague. ... He says the pesticide DDT "may even prevent breast cancer". ... Since he loves high fat diets with lots of beef, pork, lamb, milk, cheese, butter, bacon, eggs, chicken and turkey he says low fat diets will kill you. "Low cholesterol can be much deadlier than high cholesterol", and "Cholesterol screening is not worthwhile." He also says, "Keep cholesterol levels above 200", and "Cholesterol doesn't do diddly." ... Want to get rid of arthritis? Just inject some cortisone- "the real miracle for joint pain and swelling". ... Instead of taking supplements like CoQ10, Flax oil and glucosamine, just take some hydrogen peroxide. ... You don't need to exercise anymore either. Exercise is just, "a bunch of joint-destroying, heart-stressing lunacy". Articles like Mason’s are decidedly in the minority when it comes to Dr. Douglass. Far more prevalent are links like this one: Dr. William Campbell Douglass, Doctor of the year! Which led to a site selling Dr. Douglass’s e-books – but it doesn’t have a word about the good doctor being “doctor of the year.” Bear in mind, people like Dr. Douglass are merely advertisers on Human Events. For the political commentary one must turn to writers like Ann Coulter. Not that Ms. Coulter doesn’t have a toe or two in the money-grubbing pool that is Human Events. One late June weekend I received emails from her on back-to-back days, one advising me how I could get a free copy of her latest book (by paying nearly $40 for a one-year subscription to Human Events), the other advising me to let a gentleman named Mark Skousen (a former CIA man) advise me on my financial affairs. As for Ms. Coulter’s actual writing, here’s a sample: Justice Kennedy: American Idle 06/18/2008 After reading Justice Anthony Kennedy's recent majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, I feel like I need to install a "1984"-style Big Brother camera in my home so Justice Kennedy can keep an eye on everything I do. Until last week, the law had been that there were some places in the world where American courts had no jurisdiction. For example, U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over non-citizens who have never set foot in the United States. But now, even aliens get special constitutional privileges merely for being caught on a battlefield trying to kill Americans. I think I prefer Canada's system of giving preference to non-citizens who have skills and assets. If Justice Kennedy can review the procedures for detaining enemy combatants trying to kill Americans in the middle of a war, no place is safe.... The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy in Boumediene held that it would be very troubling from the standpoint of "separation of powers" for there to be someplace in the world in which the political branches could operate without oversight from Justice Kennedy, one of the four powers of our government ... Of course, before there is a "separation of powers" issue, there must be "power" to separate. As Justice Scalia points out, there is no general principle of separation of powers. There are a number of particular constitutional provisions that when added up are referred to, for short, as "separation of powers." But the general comes from the particular, not the other way around. ... The patriotic party says we are at war, and the Guantanamo detainees are enemy combatants. ... The treason party says the detainees are mostly charity workers who happened to be distributing cheese to the poor in Afghanistan when the war broke out, and it was their bad luck to be caught near the fighting. ... The New York Times article on the decision in Boumediene notes that some people "have asserted that those held at Guantanamo have fewer rights than people accused of crimes under American civilian and military law." In the universal language of children: Duh. ... Ms. Coulter writes quite well and occasionally makes some good points. But these are overshadowed by her oh-so-obvious desire to be inflammatory – and by the relentlessly mean-spirited tone that fairly shrieks from her columns. The mental image conjured by such writing is of a little girl in a roomful of adults, bouncing from cluster to cluster pleading "Look at me! Look at me!" -- and, when not enough people look, whacking some poor shmuck in the nuts. This tone is also manifest in various little devices she uses, like her constant referral to Barack Obama as B. Hussein Obama: B. Hussein Obama's response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies. "Corporate taxes" sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government. ... Liberals complain that -- as B. Hussein Obama put it -- there's "no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road." This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now. ... Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska's barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill! We'd be gushing oil now -- except the Democrats stopped us from drilling. ... Or this little gem: If the Democrats really wanted oil companies to find more oil, they'd allow oil companies to drill offshore and to drill in ANWR, which we happen to know is bursting with oil. But they don't. They don't want drilling. They don't want more oil. They want humans to ride bicycles and then to die. We deserve it: We were mean to the polar bears. It's good to know that in the middle of a crisis, the Democrats are still liars. As long as we're fantasizing about "alternative" energy sources, what we really need is a car that runs on Democrats' lies. ... If Ms. Coulter’s writing has a saving grace – which it doesn’t – it would be her sense of humor. She is adept at the dry, stinging punch line and the venomous one-liner. But this skill would better fit a late-night talk show like The Daily Show or comedy sketch program like Saturday Night Live. Her reasoning, on the other hand, is so transparently tilted to promoting the conservative agenda that it simply can’t be taken seriously. Nonetheless, she is one of Human Events’ better writers. To read Oliver North’s August 8 “Report From a Forgotten War,” a panegyric to troops fighting in Afghanistan, is to marvel: first at how he can call a conflict that gets its share of headlines and remarks by presidential candidates “forgotten,” second at why people employ this guy, and third at sentences like this one: It has been my great blessing to have spent most of my life in the company of heroes -- people who put themselves at risk for the benefit of others. Among these heroes are, presumably, some of the other 10 people who were found guilty of crimes during the Iran-Contra affair. North was convicted in 1989 of accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents, although that conviction was later set aside on a technicality. Then there’s Michael Reagan, son of the former president. His August 8 post was a pep talk entitled “Fight or Die Republicans” that was laced with motivational tripe like this:   Republicans have their backs against the wall, facing a bloodbath on Election Day that will leave the party in shambles and the nation in the hands of the worst conglomeration of demagogues, scoundrels and loony leftists ever put together in our nation’s history.   When you’re fighting for your life, you have two choices: whimper about your plight while the other side cuts you to pieces, or fight as if your life depends on it, which of course it does.   Dark as the outlook for survival may seem, there is a ray of light that if taken advantage of can not only save the GOP, but turn it into a rout of the Democrats that could make Election Day a victory celebration for the Republicans instead of a mournful wake.   The Democrats, who have long shown a shocking talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of near certain victory, are now trying mightily to commit political suicide, yet the majority of elected Republicans are either too blind to see a golden opportunity handed to them on a silver platter, or too stupid to take advantage of it.   Think about it, the vast majority of Americans -- almost 80 percent of them -- are angry and demanding that Congress allow drilling for oil here in the mainland United States, offshore and in Alaska, and the Democrats are thumbing their nose at them and adamantly refusing to lift the ban on drilling. ... That’s a gift from the gods, a life-saving issue that puts the pro-drilling Republicans on the right side of the year’s hottest political controversy, and provides them with a weapon they can use to draw the majority of voters to their side and save the party from an impending electoral disaster. Pushed to the limit, it can make Election Day 2008 a banner day in the party’s history. ... This drilling issue is very big these days at Human Events. And why not? Americans are angry about the high cost of gas, and drilling right here at home – offshore or in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge – has a certain patriotic, common-sense appeal. Especially to Americans either ignorant of, or unwilling to believe, all the reports showing that even if we were to start drilling tomorrow it would take years for this oil to hit the market, and that any new finds are likely to be too small to have any significant effect on world oil prices. None of that dissuades these folks. They’re convinced that there’s another Saudi Arabia nestled in the oil shale of the American West, and the fact that it would require enormous energy to recover it, not to mention enormous amounts of water in a region that already is short of that particular resource, doesn’t faze them. There is a tone that permeates conservative writing that is very reminiscent of the Old West, or at least the mythological Old West of John Ford, Gary Cooper and John Wayne. It is a macho, can-do, independent attitude that is about as attuned to today’s world as a dime novel from the late 1800s. But it is easy to see why this tone would appeal to people who find such times romantic without acknowledging their down-sides, like a lack of indoor plumbing, for instance. How comforting it must be to believe that everything would be all right, if only we could recapture that pioneer spirit. This is, I believe, a central factor to conservatism’s appeal. In a world buffeted by change, conservatism reassures people. It reassures them that America is, was, and always will be the greatest nation on Earth. It reassures them that “traditional values” are best, that capitalism is the best economic system that can possibly be devised, and that Christianity is the one, true religion. The supremacy of Christianity is certainly important to Human Events. Its attacks on Islam are nearly as relentless as its attacks on liberals, although the former are often couched as advertisements and/or recommendations for third-party books or authors. There is a great deal of very thinly disguised hate on the pages of Human Events. It is the sort of hate that would not be surprising coming from a group of marginalized people. That those spewing this hate certainly have not been marginalized for the last eight years or so, and have never been marginalized like, for instance, the Palestinian people, seems to make no difference. These are the writings of people who either believe they’ve been done grave injustice or else cynically employ such an attitude because they know it will appeal to a certain audience. Of course, maintaining this attitude takes some work. It also requires a constant, Orwellian rewriting of history. Like Big Brother, the image of Ronald Reagan requires constant burnishing, as does recounting of Republican “achievements” like the Contract With America. No Republican is too low to benefit from such revisionism, not even Richard Nixon.  Consider Monica Crowley’s pean to Nixon on the 34th anniversary of the day he became the only President to resign in disgrace.  “As the candidates debate Paris Hilton and the current president puts the final touches on his own legacy, let's take the anniversary of Nixon's resignation to review his accomplishments,” writes Ms. Crowley. Among those accomplishments she lists:   Vietnamization.  Set the precedent for the current Iraq policy: the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops while training and equipping the Vietnamese to assume their own defense. The Paris Peace Accords.  Ended the Vietnam War. Ended the Draft Lowered the Voting Age to 18 The Title IX of Education Amendments Act (affecting girls and women in high school and collegiate sports) The First Real Attempt at Health Care Reform Ms. Crowley gives Nixon credit for any and all domestic legislation adopted during his tenure, while failing to mention that these measures were authored and passed by the Democratic-controlled House and Senate, or that historians characterize Nixon as so fixated on foreign affairs that he paid little attention to domestic matters. As for the Vietnam War, if Vietnamization were such a successful policy the U.S. wouldn’t have lost that war, and Ms. Crowley conveniently fails to mention that Nixon could have ended the war two or three years earlier, but kept it going because he felt it would help him win re-election in 1972. And the first real attempt at health care reform was the unsuccessful effort of Democrat Harry Truman, 20 years before Nixon was president. Yet this trickery is not the most striking quality of Ms. Crowley’s column (which is headlined “Why McCain and Obama Should Look to Nixon”). That honor goes to her explanation of why Nixon resigned: “The Watergate scandal forced his early exit and forever marred what was one of the most visionary presidencies in American history.” In truth, Nixon did do some good things. But to make Watergate sound like some accident that befell him, rather than historic malfeasance that he himself orchestrated and then repeatedly lied about, is to do a profound disservice to history. As for calling his a “visionary presidency,” that could only be acceptable if Ms. Crowley also mentioned some of the sources of his visions, such as the man’s drinking and deep-seated paranoia. When people consistently play as fast and loose with the truth as the people at Human Events do, you have to wonder about their motives. I suspect that I have amply demonstrated one motive: to get chumps to part with their money. Their other primary motivation must be a profound discomfort with modernity, and I use that term not in reference to today but to the last half-century. In the final analysis, conservatives are people who see time passing them by. Lacking the ability to adapt, they are bitter folk, pinning their hopes on imposing their tired world-view on others, which helps explain their fondness for war and confrontational, bloody prose. They are a mean-spirited, cynical lot given to trusting that might makes right because deep down they know that is the only way they can get people to “agree” with what they believe is right. As for why this doctrine appeals to people, that too is easy enough to figure out. It is a simple, clear-cut, black-and-white, us vs. them philosophy. There is very little nuance to conservative thought, and damn little room for compromise. It is a mode of thinking that requires very little thought, and Americans have always been suckers for that sort of thing.

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Friday, July 4, 2008

Chilling comments seem to run in Cheney family

My all-time favorite summer read was Jaws. Summer of 1975 was perfect timing for Peter Benchley’s thriller about a Great White shark munching on New England swimmers like appetizers: The paperback version of the best-seller was released shortly before the opening of what would turn out to be the first summer blockbuster movie, and the first film ever to gross $100 million at the box office. Ever since, I’ve thought of summer as an especially good time of year to curl up at the beach, or beside the swimming pool, or on the deck, with something frightening. 

I found just such a read today in an unexpected place: a transcript of a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion, “Assessing U.S. Policy Toward Iran.” Even though it is not a work of fiction, much less a book, it is plenty scary. And even though it doesn’t feature a large and hungry shark, it features a character every bit as frightening: Liz Cheney, daughter of the Vice President, who seems almost eager for more war in the Middle Eas.   

The discussion, sponsored by Texas Christian University, was held June 26. Moderated by Bob Schiefer of CBS News, the panel also included Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Robin Wright; Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Jon Alterman, a senior fellow at the CSIS.

What makes this admittedly unusual summer reading so scary are the comments of Cheney, who not only is the vice president’s daughter but also has held high-ranking positions at the State Department, including Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. When she speaks, you can almost hear John Williams’ Academy Award-winning score from Jaws in the background: dum-dum, dum-dum, DUM-DUM, DUM-DUM ...

... And you know the Great White is circling, getting ready to strike.

In her first extended comment, Cheney shows that she has the same disconcerting ability as her father and President George W. Bush to reach a conclusion whether the facts support it or not. Asked what she thinks Iranian intentions are regarding development of nuclear weapons, she says: 

“I mean, my sense is that it’s dangerous to sort of sit back and say, just because the international community, including the IAEA, has been pretty unified in terms of reporting on Iran’s efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon, we ought to just assume, gosh, they’re just trying to be in play. I mean, I think that the only responsible position as a nation that we can take is, they actually want what they say they want, which is they want a nuclear weapon. And frankly, as we have gone forward here through an exhaustive round of diplomacy, I think that the costs for the Iranians so far have very clearly not been sufficient to get them off that path. ...

“ ... do we talk to the Iranians, do we not talk to the Iranians? And my sense of it is that that’s really the wrong question, that the real question we have to force ourselves to ask is, can we live with a nuclear-armed Iran? And if we ask ourselves that question, then, you know, two different paths flow from that. And I think that you’ve got people in different camps in this city, not surprisingly. You’ve got some people who would say, yeah, we could live with it for a whole range of reasons. They can be contained; sort of the traditional diplomacy can work. We ought to just admit we can live with it and go forward.
 
“I think you’ve got others at the other end of the spectrum who will say absolutely not, and this is where I am. We can’t live with it, that it’s an existential threat to Israel. It’s a significant threat to American national security. It’s not something we can tolerate. I think the problem is you’ve got people in the middle, and those people in the middle say, we can’t live with it, it’s true. You ask them and they say it’s too dangerous, but they’re not really willing then to take a hard look at, well, what does that mean? Has diplomacy worked? Has talking to Iran worked? Is it possible, is it likely, that we’re on a course here that will actually lead the Iranian government to disarm?”

It’s no surprise that Cheney would lean to taking a taking a hard-line approach toward Iran. But notice how she gets there. Right off the bat, she trivializes the positions of the International Atomic Energy Association and the “international community.” They don’t see the Iranians as a great threat so we can just ignore them (as we did during the buildup to the Iraq war).

Then Cheney segues smoothly into an outright lie: That Iran has said it wants nuclear weapons. That’s not what the Iranians have said. Time after time, they’ve said they are not pursuing nukes. In fact, during his speech at Columbia University that drew so much negative attention from the mainstream media, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a very interesting but almost totally unreported observation: Iran does not seek nuclear weapons because it has determined that they are not useful – if they were useful, the U.S. would have used them to prevent losing the Vietnam War or in Iraq.   

A revealing opening

By the way, Cheney’s opening comments also do away quickly with anyone who doesn’t favor toeing the hard line. She dismisses people who would accept a nuclear-armed Iran as if they were a cluster of homeless people one has to go by in order to get to the theater. The "real problem," she says, are the people in the middle who aren't willing to take a "hard look" at what we should do if diplomacy doesn't work.

Leaving aside the fact that the only “diplomacy” we seem to employ in respect to Iran is threats and sanctions, Cheney casually waves off any value in talking. What is really needed, she argues, is that “hard look” at the remaining options. Guess what they are, considering that talking is pointless. 

That tough tone surfaces repeatedly in Cheney's remarks. European diplomats, she notes,"are not often known for the steel in their spine." She says she hasn’t given up on sanctions entirely. But then she adds:
 
“But secondly, I think the Iranians have to believe that we will use force if necessary. And I’m concerned because you had statements for a period of time there from people like the commander in CENTCOM, who has since been relieved, suggesting that force was off the table. And the problem is whenever you’ve got statements like that, in my view it actually makes the potential of having to use force greater because people will think, well, the Americans aren’t serious about using force. There’s no reason for us to participate diplomatically.”

It’s interesting to see Cheney refer to former CENTCOM commander Admiral James Fallon as having “been relieved.” Everyone knew he was let go because he was less hawkish than Bush-Cheney, but the official story was that he resigned. Liz Cheney’s statement about “statements like that” also makes you wonder about White House attitudes toward Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently said that waging war on Iran would be “extremely stressful, very challenging, with consequences that would be difficult to predict. ... I'm convinced that the solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure.”

It’s also interesting to dissect Cheney’s underlying logic regarding force and diplomacy. There are no carrots and sticks in Cheney’s “diplomatic” handbag. There are only sticks. The only way to get people to agree with the U.S. is through the threat of force.

Fortunately, both Alterman and Wright disagree with Cheney at this point. Alterman says, “The more we talk about force, I think the less likely you are to get Gulf ally cooperation ... They are terrified. Their worst case scenario is the U.S. goes in. Their second worst case scenario is Iranians get the bomb. Their best case scenario is that we manage this stuff.”

Pollack then makes an interesting contribution about carrots and sticks: “ ... First, we have not been willing to put up very big positive incentives for the Iranians in the event that they actually say, yes. We have not been willing to say we will lift our economic sanctions. We will not just bring you into the World Trade Organization; we will provide you with trade credits. We will provide you with investment guarantees. We will help you to address all of the crippling economic problems, which quite frankly, are what really matter most to the Iranians. ...

“I think the other part of it is that I don’t think that we have been willing to do some real serious horse trading with our allies when it comes to Iran. We have not been willing to go in there and say, Iran is one of our highest priorities and therefore we are willing to bargain with you to get your support on this issue, and in return we are willing to give you something that you want on some other issue. Look at how we have handled the Russians. We have antagonized them on every single issue that matters to them and then asked them to turn around and support us on Iran. I don’t think that you can possibly imagine how they would be willing to do so.”

To which Cheney replies: “I mean, it’s striking to me the extent to which the problem always seems to be us. And the problem always seems to be the United States hasn’t yet offered up just the right concession or we haven’t offered up enough concessions. And if we would just offer some more concessions, then the Iranians would suddenly – (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad would suddenly take more of an interest in the economic situation of his own people than in his nuclear weapons program. And I think it’s a fundamental sort of misunderstanding of Ahmadinejad, of his motives, of his intents, of what he wants.

“And what concerns me is that, in fact, you’re in a situation now where we are about to have a new administration come in. And particularly if it’s an Obama administration, the incentive always is, well, gosh, let’s just – we’ll be nicer. Let’s just do some more. ... I think that we have to be very, very careful, particularly because of the time-frame we’re facing here in terms of their progress towards a nuclear weapon, that we don’t just sort of fall into, well, gosh, if we just gave them some more, maybe we could get them to turn around.”

Misdirection, anyone?

Liz Cheney has a firm grasp of the neocon playbook. One basic play: Whine about people with temerity to suggest that American policy has ever been anything but correct. Another: Focus on Ahmadinejad. Because he has said some outrageous things, like questioning Israel’s right to exist, whether the Holocaust really happened, and denying the existence of homosexuality in Iran, he has become a convenient whipping boy. Jay Leno calls him Mahmoud I’m A Nut Job and the corporate media treats him like someone who belongs in National Enquirer. But in truth, as other panelists later point out, the job of president is much different in Iran than it is in the United States and Ahmadinejad is less influential than his title suggests. But this is how neocons work. It is why they like to insert Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, every chance they get. 

A little later, the audience is invited to ask questions. The first one goes right after Cheney: “You mentioned that we should – when the Iranians say they want to develop nuclear weapons, we should listen to them. And I don’t ... know how safe it is to say that anybody in the administration in Iran has expressed a desire like that.

“This leads to the second part, which is that every major grand ayatollah in Iran has issued as a standing fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons, including the supreme leader. This is available on its website in like five different languages, and this has been stated ... saying nuclear weapons creation is forbidden in Islam. So I was wondering if this should play a part in our calculus.”

Time to start dancing – around the question and back to what might be called the “Mad Shuffle,” to the accompaniment of the caption of a 1950s cartoon about President Dwight Eisenhower: “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” 

Cheney doesn't address Islam's influence at all, which is quite an omission considering that Iran's true leader is an Islamic ayatollah. Instead, she says, “Well, I think there’s no question but that they’ve got a nuclear program underway. ... you know, to me that is a case closed. ...”

Closed for Cheney perhaps, but not for Wright, who notes that Iran has demonstrated restraint in the past, as during the Iran-Iraq War when it didn’t resort to chemical weapons even though Iraq was using them. “I think there has been restraint in the past. I mean, I fully understand and I would not be surprised if Iran does have a nuclear program, but I think we have to be very
careful as a nation about how much – how far we go in making these proclamations about what they’re doing, in part because it is true that they have said, at least publicly, over and over and over, you know, that they’re not.”

Cheney then contends that the Iranian public “is sophisticated enough and aware enough of the extent to which their program is causing them to be an international pariah that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that, in fact, you’ve got sort of a majority of the Iranian public supporting a nuclear program of any kind.”

Oops. Wright pounces: “I disagree. I couldn’t disagree more. Every poll that’s been taken, including by American groups, using, you know, reliable polls, the right sampling and so forth, show that the overwhelming majority of Iranians believe that nuclear energy is their right. In Iran, they believe that that is the key to development. They think it’s a proud culture and that’s the only way they can restore their – to develop, to be more than an oil power.”

Time for a little comic relief. Verbatim from the transcript:

MS. CHENEY: Yeah, but I think – I mean, that’s anecdotal also. But my only point would be that in the same way as –

MS. WRIGHT: No, I’m talking about polls, Liz.

MS. CHENEY: Well, right, but polls, particularly I would say polls taken of Iranians by Americans are not always right.

MS. WRIGHT: No, they’re not by Americans.

And on it goes. Cheney, who’s crystal clear about Iran’s intention to build nuclear weapons despite assertions by the “international community,” the IAEA and our own National Intelligence Estimate, argues that “we need to be cautious and not talk about the Iranian people as all having a nationalistic sense of pride and demanding a nuclear-power program because I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I don’t think it’s as clear as that.”

This is a very interesting comment to come from Cheney. If the Iranian public's mood is clear to anyone, it should be her. According to rightweb.com, “While at the State Department, she oversaw efforts to develop regime-change strategies in places like Syria and Iran ... According to the New York Times (April 8, 2006), the State Department requested $85 million for a Cheney-run program ‘for scholarships, exchange programs, radio and television broadcasts, and other activities aimed at shaking up Iran's political system.’”

(At this point, feel free to wonder why $85 million of your tax money is being spent on shaking up Iran's political system. You may also feel free to see why Iran might feel threatened.)

Toward the end of the discussion, panelists were asked to assess U.S. military options in regard to Iran. Cheney said, “I think that we need to do everything we can to dispel this idea that, somehow, we don’t have the capacity militarily to take action if necessary to set back that program. ... the fundamental key ... is for them to recognize that, you know, despite what you may be hearing from Congress, despite what you may be hearing from others in the administration who might be saying force isn’t on the table, that we’re serious.”

A need to be in charge?

Now it’s almost time for Cheney to try to take over the whole program. Again, from the transcript:

MS. CHENEY: Except what you usually see happen in these circumstances – and I think what the history of this particular diplomacy has shown – is that when the talking is underway, when the diplomacy is underway, it’s always a reason not to be too tough. It’s always a reason to sort of say, gosh, don’t take that step because if you take that step, then the talks are going to fall apart. Now, how do you avoid, in a bureaucracy like ours, the talks becoming the end objective?

MR. POLLACK: I think, as you well know, that is one of the needs, one of the requirements of leadership. You need a president who is willing to step in and say the talks are not an end in themselves; they are a means to an end.

MS. CHENEY: And when would you – I’m sorry, Bob – (laughter).

MR. SCHIEFFER: Go ahead; go ahead.

MR. ALTERMAN: Looking for a second career here.

Schieffer then presses Cheney on the question of military options, but all she’s willing to say is, “I don’t think that – it doesn’t have to be an invasion.”

Cue Robin Wright.

“Can I make one point? You think Iraq was complicated or messy and we came up with unexpected obstacles? Iran would be many, many, many, many, many, many, many times more difficult and more complicated, messier, bigger population; I mean, it’s just such a nightmare. I find it hard to even fathom that people who know Iran really believe that’s a viable option.”

And Pollack chimes in: “First, I completely agree with Robin that an invasion of Iran, though I’d like to preface, Iran has three times the population, four times the landmass, and five times the problems of Iraq. I don’t think that the American public is gearing up for an invasion of Iran.”

As for air strikes, Pollack says, “What are you going to get at the end of the day? Chances are you are going to engage Iranian nationalism. ... What’s more, I think it’s also clear that that will justify building the nuclear program. And they will say, we need a nuclear weapon to prevent the Americans from doing exactly what they just did to us.”

Perhaps feeling that she is losing control of the discussion, Cheney resorts to a tried-and-true neocon strategy – one that also works well in summer thrillers: She goes for the scare.

“You know, an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon can make an announcement to the world, we have a Hezbollah cell in Chicago and it’s got a nuke. But we’re not going to tell you where it is. And unless the United States does the following things immediately, we’re setting it off. I mean, the potential for blackmail because of Iran’s connection to terrorism, for example, is one of the things that makes Iran a threat with a nuclear weapon and makes me much more skeptical about the ability to contain and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Which brings us near – bot not quite to – the climax of our frightening summer read. Before it ends, one more thing must be addressed: What if Israel decides to strike Iran?

“What happens?” Pollack says. “Look, my guess is if the Israelis actually do something, they are going to provoke an Iranian response. What I don’t know is how the Iranians respond. ... It is conceivable to me that they decide to retaliate against us in addition to the Israelis. But my guess is – and I know that this is something that Israelis are concerned about and it is one of the disincentives that they face – is I think the Israelis are very nervous that if they do it, what happens is actually that Hezbollah and Hamas are told, we gave you guys 15,000 rockets for a reason. Use them.”

Wright adds, “I think the danger is that any action by Israel will be seen as having not just received an amber light from the United States, but a green light. And would probably have to involve – they will believe – some complicity, whether it’s flying over Iraqi airspace, use of some kinds of warplanes or equipment that are supposed to have limits on them – that there will be a perception that this was not an Israeli operation, but an American-Israeli operation.”

And Cheney says, “You know, I don’t disagree with very much of what they said – of what Robin and Ken said. I mean, I suppose I think that the Israelis mean it when they say that it’s an existential threat to them, and that they make calculations accordingly. And I certainly don’t think that we should do anything but support them because I think it is an existential threat to them.”

So there you are. Yes, there would be consequences to military action, but do we have steel in our spines or not? When the Israelis say something, we believe it automatically. When the Iranians say something, we automatically assume they’re lying. If we let the Iranians get nuclear weapons, pretty soon they’ll be setting them off in your neighborhood supermarket. We’ve told them to stop, but they won’t listen.

So what choice do we have? The only answer is force, not because it’s the only thing those people understand but because it’s the only thing people like Liz Cheney understand. 

And the Great White keeps circling ...

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September, 2005

Pounding down our Bourbon (Street)



    Until August 29, New Orleans was best known for the Mardi Gras, jazz, and the condoned debauchery of Bourbon Street. What happened there stayed there long before Las Vegas was a twinkle in the eyes of Howard Hughes and the mob. But New Orleans also is one of America’s greatest cities, a place of not only historic and cultural significance but strategic importance. What happened to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck – and before and after – was more than a tragedy. It should be a clarion call to Americans to reassert their rightful control over a government that is failing its citizens dangerously, not only in Iraq but in homeland security  – in the truest sense of the words.

    For the last four years leaders have repeatedly warned of the great dangers that would accompany another terrorist attack on the United States. In fact, they’ve said repeatedly that it’s not even a matter of if there will be another attack, only when. We’ve been told that much effort 7and tens of billions of dollars are being spent on preparing to deal with the challenges – things like search and rescue, contaminated drinking water, and power outages. Things like people fleeing metropolitan areas, people needing medical attention, people needing transportation and temporary housing.

    The very things that happened in New Orleans, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency practiced how it would respond to a hurricane just one year ago.

    American leaders were no better prepared for this catastrophe than they were for Osama bin Laden or the occupation of Iraq. The intelligence failures that preceded 9/11 and the Iraq war were bad enough. President George W. Bush’s post-Katrina comment to TV’s Diane Sawyer that “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” was ludicrous. Long before Katrina churned to life it should have been obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that The Big Easy was not only an easy, but a very important target for disaster – and not just natural disaster.

    New Orleans’ location at the mouth of the Mississippi River has made it strategically important to the US ever since it was the key to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. When Katrina slammed it, the city was home to one of the largest and busiest ports in the world. Major companies in the communications, energy and information sectors had either headquarters or regional hubs there. It was home to a NASA assembly facility. And it was close to vital oil refineries and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Those supposedly preparing for inevitable terrorism and its inevitable impacts should have marked New Orleans on their inevitable maps with at least a red pin.

    New Orleans is one of the most diverse cities in America, visited annually by 9 million people from around the world, a place where foreign terrorists could have blended in easily. It also was, literally, a murderous place long before Katrina, with a murder rate 10 times the national average. Could it have been fertile ground for recruiting killers?

    Nearly 30 percent of New Orleans’ residents live below the poverty line, including more than 40 percent of those under the age of 18, many in some of the most dangerous public housing projects in America. Historically, Louisiana has had ties with political extremism and violence. Huey Long, the state’s dynamic populist Governor and then U.S. Senator who proclaimed that “every man is a king, but no one wears a crown”, was assassinated  in Baton Rouge in 1935, one month after entering the Democratic presidential race. Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans and lived there again for four months before leaving for Dallas a month before the November, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1989 a Louisiana Congressional district sent Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to the U.S. House of Representatives. Duke was founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a far-right white nationalist organization. Fertile ground for recruiting accomplices, if not converts?

    Government officials in New Orleans and Louisiana have a long history of being corrupt, inept or both, as have the city police. Some of those officers joined in the post-Katrina looting. About 250 of them responded to the emergency by quitting. Fertile ground for gaining inside information or access to sensitive facilities?

    As devastating as this disaster was, had it been a well-coordinated terrorist attack instead of a hurricane, things could’ve been even worse.

    Federal response during the critical first hours and days after Katrina struck was so inadequate that even tsunami-battered Sri Lanka was offering aid. That is woeful, and deeply troubling. So are the Bush administration’s priorities. While thousands of American men, women and children were dying in New Orleans, more than 3,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were in Iraq. They were there with their high water vehicles, Humvees and portable generators, watching on TV as people back home died waiting in vain for help.

     In Katrina’s aftermath many reporters likened Louisiana to a third-world country. They should visit more frequently, and travel a little farther afield. Much of Louisiana wasn’t much above a third-world country before Katrina. For visitors, New Orleans was where you could tour a Civil War-era mansion, ride a steamboat on the Mississippi, enjoy food like jambalaya and alligator, listen to just about any kind of music, drink as much you want without having to worry about driving afterward, watch a stripper or some other kind of artist at work, and have your Tarot read – all in one day. But for many of those who welcomed the visitors, life was very different. For the bellhops, cooks and maids. For the musicians, artists and those who were brave, foolish or unlucky enough to live on the street. For the police, who even in calm weather responded to night after endless night of depravity, only part of it arising from drunken tourists.

 
   Why did so many people fail to evacuate despite authorities’ warnings to do so? Disaster expert Gregory V. Button said there were over 100,000 residents who were sick or disabled even before the hurricane, and “approximately 120,000 residents are low income and don’t possess cars or any type of transportation.” About half the people of New Orleans, where the median household income was a meager $27,133, didn’t flee because they simply couldn’t flee. A sizable segment didn’t own cars because with its streetcars, buses, pedestrian-only areas and subtropical climate, New Orleans was that rarest bird of American cities, one where you didn’t need a car to live.

    The Big Easy has been known more for its excesses than its successes. But in its rich culture, its important history and its acceptance of diversity, even amid poverty and squalor, the birthplace of jazz is truly a model American city.

    The shooting and looting and chaos that erupted after Katrina were deplorable. Most of the looters were people of color, as were most of the victims of the hurricane and its aftermath. Hardly surprising, given that only 28 percent of the city’s population was white. Would rescue efforts have been better if the city were predominantly white? Former Senator Carol Mosley Braun of Illinois was generously on the mark when she replied, “Racism was a sin of omission in that we don’t think about these people, we don’t care about them until they’re left to their own devices in a situation that was a national tragedy.”

    Even now, the care shown for New Orleans by some Americans is tempered by political or social agendas. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, who was mounting relief efforts through his evangelical charity Samaritan's Purse, told the Fox News Channel that the violence in New Orleans is what “happens in our country when we have taken God out of our schools and our society.” Michael Marcavage, director of an organization called Repent America, said people “must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long,” pointing out that “‘Southern Decadence’ has a history of filling the French Quarters (sic) section of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars.” (None of which explains why the Quarter suffered less damage than most of New Orleans. Hint: The Quarter was built on the arc of’ highest ground that gave the town the nickname The Crescent City. Call that intelligent design.)

    Columbia Christians for Life said God struck New Orleans because it was home to five abortion clinics; their proof was a radar image they said showed that the hurricane “looks like a fetus facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation.”

    There really might be a blessing in disguise to Katrina, but it has yet to be glimpsed by such Christian fundamentalists. Or Muslims who saw it as Allah’s punishment, or Jews who viewed it as a fitting and timely reprisal for the removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip only ten days before. The true blessing might be the exposure to the Gulf Coast gained by those coming from elsewhere to help rebuild, and the dispersal of New Orleans citizens throughout the US to tell their stories to good people who hadn’t realized how badly the federal government was failing us all.

    New Orleans has been no stranger to tragedy over the years, its trials a fiber in the national psyche whether they were fictional like “A Streetcar Named Desire” or real, like the  fires that devastated it in 1788 and 1795, and the flooding Mississippi that washed over Louisiana in 1927. On July 24 of this year, Louisiana (population 4.5 million) tied New York (population 19 million) for the most Guardsmen and Reservists killed in Iraq – 23, all but one of them in the previous eight months. As Katrina approached, New Orleans’ levees were hopelessly outdated. For years, the Louisiana coastline had been eroding at a rate of 35 square miles a year. But decades of requests for federal money to upgrade the levees and protect the coastline had gone crying into the Washington wilderness.   

    When Katrina struck, many of the people of New Orleans watched the world as they knew it come to a sudden, brutal end. Can things ever be the same, not only for the thousands who survived but for the millions who visited every year? President Bush promises to fashion an even bigger, better and “even higher” New Orleans. Just how making New Orleans higher will help isn’t clear unless the goal is to cram even more drunken gamblers into a vulnerable area with serious evacuation problems. This might not be bad public policy, but a President who admits to having swayed down Bourbon Street to more than music should know there’s really not much need to make New Orleans any higher. But better ... yes, better would be good.

    The shame of New Orleans in 2005 should lie very heavily on the hearts and minds of politicians who see poor Americans as disposable, whether in illegitimate wars overseas or daily life right here at home. Every bit as shameful as the response to Hurricane Katrina was that, in supposedly the most powerful country in the world, so many citizens have to live such vulnerable lives in the first place. New Orleans isn’t the only American city to offer tourists a favorable facade while giving many of its residents much less rewarding lives. Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Miami are similar. Detroit hosted baseball’s All-Star Game this summer and will host football’s Super Bowl this winter, partly because taxpayers subsidized stadiums for the Lions and Tigers for decades. After the stars and the glitz and the bling have come and gone, Detroit will remain the poorest city in the country.

    History is shaped by the conjunction of events both foreseen and unforeseen. When the US invaded Iraq there were those who warned that we could become stuck like Br’er Rabbit to the Tar Baby, and those who worried that support at home might dim rapidly if we did bog down. But no one could have predicted that less than a year after Bush won re-election mainly because voters saw him as better able to protect America, his sham would be so vividly revealed by his gross failure to protect Louisiana. Who could have guessed that our homeland would be so insecure in a crucial oil state; that a Republican administration would treat Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi – red states all – so shamefully?

    Hurricane Katrina was an historic tragedy. But New Orleans has looked into the face of tragedy before, and found salvation. In December 1814, the British landed 10,000 troops south of town to trigger the Battle of New Orleans. It was the final battle of the War of 1812, fought a few days after the war had officially ended. Vastly outnumbered, Americans killed 700 British and wounded or imprisoned another 2,000 while suffering only 13 dead and 58 wounded. Aiding in the defense were Jean Lafitte and his pirates, liberated Haitian slaves, men from the mountains of Kentucky, and a Tennessee colonel named Andrew Jackson.

    Fourteen years later, Jackson was elected president. Not that it was easy. His first try at the White House saw him get the most votes of four candidates but still lose when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives because he didn’t have a majority of all votes. The House chose John Quincy Adams. But Jackson won four years later, in 1828, as the first nominee of the Democratic Party he had helped found. He was the first president from outside the original Revolutionary circle of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison; the first president from a state west of the Appalachians, in the first election in which many states allowed people without land to vote. A military hero and once a prisoner of war, he also was the last president who was a veteran of the American Revolution, which claimed the lives of his entire immediate family.

    Americans are responding generously and creatively to the tremendous needs of their Gulf Coast neighbors because Americans are basically generous and creative. But how will we respond to the callousness and ineptitude of our elected leaders? Will the Democratic Party remember its roots and rouse itself to relevance? Will the GOP be made to pay a price in the 2006 elections? Will Bush continue to slither off the hook of responsibility? Will we see that it was not entirely good luck that five air bases across the country had 4,000 beds available because of troops gone to Iraq?

    Will we continue to pour the blood of our young people, especially our poor young people, into the oxymoron of trying to impose democracy on a foreign country? Will we allow our present government to guarantee that the troops keep coming by appointing Supreme Court justices who will tell American women they must give birth to all the children they can bear? 

    Americans must insist that true homeland security, like charity, begins at home – but not in a cynical, wasteful and misguided policy of killing them “over there” before they can kill us at home. Will we stand up to Democratic and Republican leaders – and lobbyists and influence-peddlers, to demand change? Or will we continue to act as we have, mere tourists in our own country, casually tossing a few dollars into the hats or hands of the little black boys who dance in the French Quarter like minstrels, then heading down Bourbon Street, drunkenly oblivious to the dangers waiting to consume us?

---

November, 2005

Take nothing for granted

  
    Regardless of how you feel about Henry Kissinger, you have to give the man this much: For decades now, he's been very close to some very powerful people. So it was that Kissinger, who thawed relations with China as President Richard Nixon's secretary of state in the 1970s, was named in 2001 to the board of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which recently made an unsuccessful bid to buy Unocal, the eighth-largest oil-producing company in the US.

     Although he officially left the US government almost 30 years ago, Henry the K's geopolitical focus remains an important influence. There's a "Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger Separation" parlor game that shows how every one of the 13 national security advisers who followed Kissinger have either worked with him or for him, or for his staff.

    There's a similar separation from the oil business for many of them. Current Secertary of State Condoleeza Rice is formerly of Chevron, which once named an oil tanker for her. So it's not surprising that today's neo-conservatives in Washington share Kissinger's vision. The tragedy for the US and the world is that it is such a violent one.

    While China, India and Iran have become rising players on the world oil stage through a variety of multinational business deals and peaceful partnerships, the administration of President George W. Bush has gone the military route, taking over Iraq, which has the world's second-largest oil reserves, and Afghanistan, which has long been coveted as the location for a crucial pipeline. That line would transport oil from the rich Caspian Sea region to the rapidly emerging demands of Central Asian nations like India and Pakistan, and possibly even to China.

    Nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq. No one really knows how many Iraqis have died. Estimates range from 23,000 to over 100,000.

    Bush's "war on terror" is going so splendidly that his administration stopped calling it that for a while. Doesn’t matter. It's always been a war for oil. And Henry Kissinger and his ilk have never been far removed from it.      


    Since World War II ended in 1945, American foreign policy has been driven by two primary and intertwined concerns: remaining the world's greatest military power and guaranteeing our access to petroleum. Forget human rights or communism or democracy, whether the president touting it was Kennedy, a Bush, Reagan or Carter. One of WW II's great lessons was petroleum's enormous value. The atom bomb destroyed Japan, but not before its lack of petroleum had brought it to its knees. When the victors divided the spoils -- when Iraq as we know it was created from three distinct cultures by the Allies -- President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made sure they maintained control of most of the world's oil supply.

    Before WW II, Britain had dominated the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. But when revolution began to spread in those countries after the war the British, who had been so badly damaged in their six-year battle against the Nazis, could no longer maintain colonial rule. Over the next half-century three things happened: The US increased its corporate and military presence in the Middle East enormously, the nation of Israel was founded (after the native Palestinians were conquered -- can you say "beachhead"?), and the Soviet Union, which had been vying for influence, collapsed.

    One company that has flourished through it all is good old BP, which owns all those green, yellow and white gas stations that have exploded across the American landscape in the last seven years, since BP took over Amoco. BP is British Petroleum, although its new slogan is "Beyond Petroleum". Which may have been more apt all along.

    The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was created in 1908, after a Britisher named William Knox D'Arcy found oil in Persia. When that oil became an important source of fuel during World War I the British government took control of the company. It retained control for the next 24 years, until growing opposition to imperialism prompted the Shah of Persia to end its contract in 1932. It was resumed within a year, with Persia getting a bigger share of profits. In 1936, Persia was renamed Iran. Big deal. The United Kingdom remained in control of Iranian oil until 1951, when Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated, a bill was passed to nationalize the oil industry, and the Shah was forced to leave the country.

    The company fought against that nationalization in the International Court of Justice, but lost its case. The oil business,