Go to Original
By Bill Van Auken
The embrace of key elements of the Republican agenda and jettisoning of positions that he advanced during his “Change you can believe in” primary campaign have become a daily routine, as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate Barack Obama carries out a dizzying turn to the right.
In speeches and press appearances on Wednesday and Thursday, Obama continued to identify his campaign with support for American militarism, while backing away from his primary-campaign pledge to withdraw US combat forces from Iraq based on a definite timetable.
Appearing Wednesday in Colorado Springs, Obama delivered a speech on national service, which hailed the US military and vowed to swell its ranks.
While proposing the expansion of Americorps, the Peace Corps and other civilian entities, Obama made it clear that the main service to which he intended to call young Americans was the military.
He began by invoking the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and lamenting the failure of the Bush administration to issue “a call to service” and “a call for shared sacrifice.”
“There is no challenge greater than the defense of our nation and our values,” he continued, praising the actions of US troops “fighting a resurgent Taliban” and “persevering in the deserts and cities of Iraq.”
What “values” are embodied in the systematic destruction of the Afghan and Iraqi societies and the killing and maiming of millions of civilians in the attempt to impose US hegemony over oil-rich regions of the planet, the Democratic candidate did not spell out.
Instead, he insisted on the “need to ease the burden on our troops, while meeting the challenges of the 21st century.” That these “challenges” entail the continuation of these wars and the launching of new ones is clear. As president, he said, he would “call on a new generation of Americans to join our military,” while vowing to increase US ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines.
With the military struggling to meet current recruitment quotas, this proposal raises the real question of whether the national service envisioned by Obama will involve the reactivation of the military draft.
Speaking at a press conference in Fargo, North Dakota Thursday before addressing a group of veterans, Obama allowed that he expected to “refine” his positions on Iraq during an upcoming trip to the US occupied country this summer.
Backing away from his earlier pledge to carry out a 16-month withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, the candidate said, “I have always said I would listen to the commanders on the ground. I have always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability.” Meanwhile, he couched his opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq at current levels in terms of what he posed as the more urgent necessity for sending troops to Afghanistan.
Obama’s advisors have been more explicit. His top foreign policy advisor, Anthony Lake, a former Clinton administration national security advisor, told the press that an incoming Democratic administration was committed to maintaining “a residual force for clearly defined missions” in Iraq, as well as “preparedness to go back in,” if needed. “That is not a ‘cut and run’ and let’s just see what happens,’” said Lake, one of the architects of the Clinton administration’s “humanitarian” interventions in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans.
Meanwhile, there is growing speculation that Obama is prepared to keep current US Defense Secretary Robert Gates at his post and the campaign has agreed to participate in a series of transition teams being set up in military, intelligence and police agencies to assure the seamless continuation of the “global war on terrorism.”
Having won the Democratic primaries in no small part by posturing as an opponent of the Iraq war and indicting his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for voting to authorize it, Obama is now presenting himself as another “wartime president.”
The lurch to the right by the Obama campaign is so blatant that it has aroused substantial commentary in the bourgeois press, some of it gloating and some of it reflecting concerns that this maneuver is so naked that it may alienate substantial layers of the population from the electoral process and expose the fraud of the entire two-party system.
The Christian Science Monitor, for example, cited concerns Thursday that Obama’s lurch to the right posed “a particular risk among young voters, who have turned out and volunteered in droves for Obama and may be disillusioned by his display of old-style politics.”
In the gloating category was an editorial published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Bush’s Third Term.” The Journal, whose editorial board has generally reflected the views within the right-wing sections of the Republican Party that dominate the Bush administration, pointed to Obama’s continuous warnings against McCain’s victory resulting in “George Bush’s third term.”
“Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate running for it,” the editorial affirmed.
It went on to note Obama’s announcement two weeks ago that he will vote for legislation legalizing the Bush administration’s sweeping domestic wiretapping program, while granting retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that helped it carry out this unlawful spying operation. It pointed to the pullback from campaign promises of a timetable for withdrawing US combat troops from Iraq. And it cited his embrace of government funding for “faith-based” social programs, as well as a series of calculated statements on so-called hot button issues of the political right, ranging from guns to the death penalty.
Another demagogic appeal that the Obama campaign has jettisoned is the previous pretense that he opposed NAFTA and sympathized with the protectionist outlook of the trade union bureaucracy. In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, the candidate declared, “I’ve always been a proponent of free trade,” and allowed that some of the primary rhetoric on the subject had been “overheated.”
“Now that he is in a general election,” the Journal commented, “he can’t scare the business community too much.” It would appear that the stock exchange is not at all frightened. According to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama has netted nearly $8 million in contributions from the securities and investment houses, almost double the amount received by his Republican rival, McCain.
The Journal editorial concludes cynically, though justifiably, that “the next President, whether Democrat or Republican, is going to embrace much of Mr. Bush’s foreign and antiterror policy whether he admits it or not.”
In the end, this right-wing voice of Wall Street criticizes Obama not for his policies, but rather for what it terms his questionable “political character,” meaning doubts about whether he can be trusted to carry through the wars abroad and attacks on the working class at home that the ruling elite requires.
Obama’s turn to the right is the manifestation of a system in which the policies of both major parties are determined by a small wealthy layer of the population, which holds the will and sentiments of the American population in contempt.
The right-wing agenda being spelled out by the Obama campaign sets the stage for yet another election in which the masses of working people in the US will find themselves politically disenfranchised, with no viable means to express their immense hostility to the policies of war, destruction of living standards, and political reaction identified with the Bush administration.
Obama’s rapid evolution in the wake of the primaries demonstrates the politics of deception and manipulation of public opinion that his campaign has embodied from the outset. It has never represented an insurgency from below, but rather a bid by elements of the ruling elite to effect certain definite but limited changes in policy, while using Obama to supply a fresh face for American imperialism under conditions in which it is discredited at home and abroad.
The attempt to use the Obama campaign to delude broad layers of the population seeking change enjoys the active and crucial support of most of what passes for the American “left.” They seek to cover up or apologize for the right-wing trajectory of the Democrats. Some put forward the cynical argument that Obama is merely doing what it takes to get elected—the American people, they would argue, are backward and right-wing. Others maintain that he is reacting to pressure from the establishment and must be pushed back on course through pressure from the left.
Typical of this second school is the left liberal journalist Arianna Huffington, who posted on her web site advice to Obama, warning him that “tacking to the center is a losing strategy.”
Instead, she called upon him to “appeal to the 82 million people who did not vote in 2004.” She continued, “Isn’t galvanizing the electorate to demand fundamental change the raison d’être of the Obama campaign in the first place?”
In reality, Obama is now running on his real program, that of a corrupt and reactionary big business politician. He will leave it to figures like Huffington, the Nation, and others on the so-called left to continue promoting illusions in his candidacy, while he makes his pitch to his key constituencies, the financial aristocracy and the forces of the state.
The Democrats have no interest in coming into office with a mandate for “fundamental change,” because they have no desire or intention of carrying out such transformations. In fact, Obama’s latest campaign swing is aimed in no small part at creating a new and decidedly conservative base for politics that will in key respects represent continuity with those of the Bush administration.
In the end, the promotion of illusions in Obama and the Democrats serves only to block the emergence of a genuine alternative based upon the independent political mobilization of the broad mass of working people.
One thing is certain. The policies of an incoming Obama administration will not be determined by the erstwhile populist posturing of the candidate or by the pressure exerted by the left liberals. Rather, they will be dictated by the enormity of the economic and political crisis confronting American capitalism and what is required under these conditions to defend the class interests of the ruling elite. The turn to the right on the campaign trail is preparation for this essential task.
Friday, July 4, 2008
The Ashes Have Been Passed To A New Generation
Go to Original
By David Michael Green
We live in the most astonishing of times, politically speaking.
And I don’t mean that as a compliment.
There is so much I would hate to try to have explain to an alien about our politics. Same with a human five centuries from now - it’s just that I’m not so sure there’ll be any.
In America, a regressive majority of one on the Supreme Court disappears a whole clause from the Second Amendment in order to interpret it favorably for an industry merchandizing mass quantities of small death machines. Thirty or forty thousand of us are swept away every year by these killers, but few find the coincidence of that fact with their ubiquitous presence - by some estimates, there is nearly one gun for every American nowadays - somehow noteworthy.
One president has oral sex in a private consensual relationship and lies about it, so right-wing freaks spend $40 million to investigate this most heinous of crimes and bring impeachment charges against a president for only the second time in American history. Meanwhile, one of their own admits to trashing the Constitution at every turn and isn’t even investigated, let alone impeached, let alone removed from office.
This same president plunges the world into war on the basis of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but couldn’t be less concerned when North Korea actually goes nuclear on his watch. This president goes to war to bring democracy to the Arab world, but can’t even be bothered to pressure Egypt or Saudi Arabia to move a tad in that direction. This president uses an attack on the US to justify international belligerence and mass human rights violations, but doesn’t seem very interested in even attacking, let alone vanquishing, the supposed perpetrator.
The list of these political out-of-body experiences is as endless as it is absurd. I may not speak Martian very well, but even I can tell you what the look on the face of that little green feller with the antennae means. He’s thinking, “Wow, you humans are the strangest freaks in the galaxy, man!”
Well, actually, it’s not so much the entire species, but mostly just us especially twisted sisters manning the bridge over here in the, uh, world’s only superpower. Bad coincidence, eh? Even we wacky Gringos know that weapons and criminals make a bad combination, as do weapons and lunatics. So, what fool handed us the keys to this planetary oil tanker? Shouldn’t, like, um, the Swedes or the Norwegians be the world’s superpower? They seem harmless enough.
Yep, we could go on and on detailing the ludicrous inanities of American politics in the age of Bush (himself Exhibit A), but really my favorite has to be the case of global warming. In a society devoted like no other to the politics of fear, we have somehow managed to forget the one thing we should probably fear most.
Imagine if there was a meteor headed toward our one and only planet, with the potential to do devastating and possibly lethal damage to the planet. Imagine that we had the technological capability to divert the course of this weapon of the massiest mass destruction, and all we needed was the will to do so. And imagine that we chose to focus our society’s energies instead on … gay marriage. Or illegal immigration. Or premarital sex.
Not only would we screw up all of those policy areas, but we be toast anyhow, along with all our unmarried gays, undocumented workers and ‘virgin’ teenagers (who, have you seen, just become experts at anal and oral sex in order to avoid the forbidden standard kind?). Good lord, this is a society which desperately needs medication! Or maybe that’s the problem, and we desperately need to ditch all the brain-benders of every sort that we imbibe like candy.
Remember Dick Cheney’s ‘one percent doctrine’? He argued that if there’s even a one percent chance of a terrorist attack, you have to go on the offensive. Of course, reality external to the Vice President’s secret location tends to be a bit more nuanced than that, but that’s why everyone calls him Dick, I guess. Anyhow, there’s this little thing called cost-benefit analysis that seems to have gone sorely missing over the last, er, eight years or so. It was last seen flowing down the sewers of Baghdad. It would argue, for example, that yes, you should take threats seriously, but that if the solution to a one percent probability of danger that could threaten the lives of a thousand people is to adopt a policy which definitely kills 100 million of your own citizens, that’s probably a bad plan. Costs and benefits, you see. I mean, people can differ on this, of course, but I’d vote to take the one percent risk in such a case. At a minimum I’d certainly argue that we ought to weight the costs along with the benefits every once in a while. Admittedly, though, that’s not so helpful when you’re in the middle of trying to scare the hell out of people so they’ll vote for you, or acquiesce to your destructive policies.
But I digress. There is a monstrous catastrophe not only headed our way, but actually already here. I’m not a climatologist, but my sense from paying attention to media reporting on this issue over the last two decades is that there is not only a one percent chance that global warming is both real and anthropogenic, but rather a ninety-five percent chance. Perhaps ninety-nine. Yep, sure, there are a few scientists out there still making the opposite argument. Probably some of them even aren’t on oil company payrolls! But the vast majority of reputable climate scientists now agree that this is happening, that we are making it happen, and that the results will be catastrophic. This, after ten and twenty years of a (somewhat) healthy scientific skepticism about those claims, which only further underscores the validity of the findings.
So what will they say about us five centuries from now - those very few, very toasty, remaining humans, living on mountain tops, the only dry land to be found? What they’ll say is probably unprintable in any family newspaper, that’s for sure. But in-between the expletives I think you’d be likely to find words like … “unconscionable” … “breathtakingly stupid” … “astonishingly selfish” … and, “If you weren’t already dead I’d kill you!”
Last week we had James Hansen reminding Congress, twenty years after originally doing so, of the gravity of this situation. One of the top scientists from one of America’s premier science agencies - who was told, by the way, to shut the hell up by the Bush administration - was reminding us yet again that we are facing mass species extinctions and ecosystem collapse among the lovely perils awaiting us if we continue in the current direction. Assuming, that is, that it isn’t already far too late to turn it around now.
Think about that for a second: Mass extinction. Ecosystem collapse. Meteor. Ninety-five or better percent chance.
Gay marriage.
Takes your breath right away, doesn’t it? There are certainly few better ways to underscore the full scope of the regressive nightmare haunting a country that likes to think of itself as the last, best hope of humanity. Fat chance of that. Indeed, we - or at least some of us - half-deserve this fate for choosing the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, DeLay, Scalia and the rest these last decades. It’s the rest of the world I feel especially sorry for. Last, best hope? Jeez, the mercury had already burst out squirting from the top of my irony thermometer seven years ago. Somehow I don’t think so. Well, maybe the ‘last’ part…
And what’s especially killer about this particular issue is the degree to which the multiple maladies and solutions all line up so neatly. Sometimes the cosmos sends you a message in very subtle ways. Other times it beats you over the head with a two-by-four. Occasionally, it detonates a small nuclear device in your backyard swimming pool to get your attention.
We’re very much in the latter category right now. You don’t exactly have to do a full and complete inventory to figure this one out. Here, just take this pop quiz. Quick, now: What factor do all of the following items have in common: massive environmental devastation, skyrocketing transportation and food prices, a declining middle-class with disappearing jobs, and a war-prone and constant calamity-threatening Middle East continually sucking in American military involvement and nightmarishly distorting our foreign policy? (If you’re somehow still struggling with this, you may want to consider spending a little more time catching up with current events. Meanwhile, though, here’s a bonus hint for you: Alan Greenspan described this as the real reason America went to war in Iraq.)
Did you get it?!?! Okay! A+ for you! Now flip it on it’s head. What would be a way in which our society could address the massive threats of global warming, a sinking middle class with lousy jobs, poverty-inducing energy costs and military nightmares in the Middle East, all at once? How about if we made it a giant national priority to wean ourselves off carbon-based energy sources through a variety of policies mixing incentives and regulations, and a huge national effort to develop alternative fuel sources, with all the industrial development and good-paying jobs associated with launching such industries? You know. What did Jimmy Carter call it, thirty freakin’ years ago? “The moral equivalent of war”, wasn’t it? Too bad he was a failed president, though. Hardly invaded any other countries. What could he possibly have known?
Seriously, though, here’s a chance to go from the all-wrong scenario of environmental destruction / energy dependence / Middle East war / horrific gas prices / recession / middle class decline, over to the all-right scenario of sustainability / energy independence / peace / reasonable energy costs / economic development / prosperity - all in one fell swoop. I mean, I know that regressives have a problem with any policies that actually make sense, and I know that Americans are just about the dumbest branch of the homo politicus family tree, but isn’t this a no-brainer so obvious that even people who actually have no brains could figure it out?
So, last week James Hansen reminded us that we are headed for such joyous ‘lifestyle changes’ as mass extinction and ecosystem collapse. Of course, most regressives continued to pooh-pooh such warnings as some sort of liberal conspiracy to undermine capitalism. I must say, these people blow me away with their unflinching and robotic dogmatism. I mean, I get why they insist on the Earth being only 6,000 years old and anything having to do with sex being a major sin. They’re incredibly frightened, and these beliefs bring the existential comfort of order to an otherwise messy and capricious universe. But what’s up with middle class fools ardently supporting tax cuts for the wealthy? Or any human being in the whole world denying the near unanimous testimony of scientific experts regarding a planetary threat, because oil companies told them to do so? Do climatologists seriously strike anybody as crypto-anarchists masquerading as scientists in order to destroy capitalism? (Listen to some regressive kooks talk about global warming and you could easily think so.) And, if that was really their goal, wouldn’t there be a lot easier ways to crash the system than to go spend years getting a PhD, do a bunch of boring research for low pay, and grade a million mind-numbing term papers written by a million grammatically-challenged college sophomores?
Then there’s that pesky little problem of evidence. Every week there’s more, though hardly any quite as egregious as what you could have seen on CNN.com just a few days ago: “North Pole Could Be Ice-Free This Summer, Scientists Say”. Woo-hoo. No worries there, eh? Now if Adam and Steve get married in California or Massachusetts, that’s something to get worked up about. But the destruction of the Arctic ice cap? We’ve already got polar bears in zoos, so what’s the big damn deal? Prolly it’ll be easier to get to the oil up there without all that ice in the way, anyhow.
What will they say - assuming there are any they left to be saying - in five centuries about us nice folks who managed to bequeath the solar system a second Mercury where a green and fertile planet once stood, just so we could party a little longer? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will be pretty. And I don’t think it will be, “Well, sure, they weren’t perfect. And, true, they wrecked the whole planet. But at least they kept boys from marrying other boys.”
These regressive fools and their pre-/anti-scientific religious superstitions just kill me.
And that’s just the problem. They’re killing all of us.
Praise the lord.
By David Michael Green
We live in the most astonishing of times, politically speaking.
And I don’t mean that as a compliment.
There is so much I would hate to try to have explain to an alien about our politics. Same with a human five centuries from now - it’s just that I’m not so sure there’ll be any.
In America, a regressive majority of one on the Supreme Court disappears a whole clause from the Second Amendment in order to interpret it favorably for an industry merchandizing mass quantities of small death machines. Thirty or forty thousand of us are swept away every year by these killers, but few find the coincidence of that fact with their ubiquitous presence - by some estimates, there is nearly one gun for every American nowadays - somehow noteworthy.
One president has oral sex in a private consensual relationship and lies about it, so right-wing freaks spend $40 million to investigate this most heinous of crimes and bring impeachment charges against a president for only the second time in American history. Meanwhile, one of their own admits to trashing the Constitution at every turn and isn’t even investigated, let alone impeached, let alone removed from office.
This same president plunges the world into war on the basis of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but couldn’t be less concerned when North Korea actually goes nuclear on his watch. This president goes to war to bring democracy to the Arab world, but can’t even be bothered to pressure Egypt or Saudi Arabia to move a tad in that direction. This president uses an attack on the US to justify international belligerence and mass human rights violations, but doesn’t seem very interested in even attacking, let alone vanquishing, the supposed perpetrator.
The list of these political out-of-body experiences is as endless as it is absurd. I may not speak Martian very well, but even I can tell you what the look on the face of that little green feller with the antennae means. He’s thinking, “Wow, you humans are the strangest freaks in the galaxy, man!”
Well, actually, it’s not so much the entire species, but mostly just us especially twisted sisters manning the bridge over here in the, uh, world’s only superpower. Bad coincidence, eh? Even we wacky Gringos know that weapons and criminals make a bad combination, as do weapons and lunatics. So, what fool handed us the keys to this planetary oil tanker? Shouldn’t, like, um, the Swedes or the Norwegians be the world’s superpower? They seem harmless enough.
Yep, we could go on and on detailing the ludicrous inanities of American politics in the age of Bush (himself Exhibit A), but really my favorite has to be the case of global warming. In a society devoted like no other to the politics of fear, we have somehow managed to forget the one thing we should probably fear most.
Imagine if there was a meteor headed toward our one and only planet, with the potential to do devastating and possibly lethal damage to the planet. Imagine that we had the technological capability to divert the course of this weapon of the massiest mass destruction, and all we needed was the will to do so. And imagine that we chose to focus our society’s energies instead on … gay marriage. Or illegal immigration. Or premarital sex.
Not only would we screw up all of those policy areas, but we be toast anyhow, along with all our unmarried gays, undocumented workers and ‘virgin’ teenagers (who, have you seen, just become experts at anal and oral sex in order to avoid the forbidden standard kind?). Good lord, this is a society which desperately needs medication! Or maybe that’s the problem, and we desperately need to ditch all the brain-benders of every sort that we imbibe like candy.
Remember Dick Cheney’s ‘one percent doctrine’? He argued that if there’s even a one percent chance of a terrorist attack, you have to go on the offensive. Of course, reality external to the Vice President’s secret location tends to be a bit more nuanced than that, but that’s why everyone calls him Dick, I guess. Anyhow, there’s this little thing called cost-benefit analysis that seems to have gone sorely missing over the last, er, eight years or so. It was last seen flowing down the sewers of Baghdad. It would argue, for example, that yes, you should take threats seriously, but that if the solution to a one percent probability of danger that could threaten the lives of a thousand people is to adopt a policy which definitely kills 100 million of your own citizens, that’s probably a bad plan. Costs and benefits, you see. I mean, people can differ on this, of course, but I’d vote to take the one percent risk in such a case. At a minimum I’d certainly argue that we ought to weight the costs along with the benefits every once in a while. Admittedly, though, that’s not so helpful when you’re in the middle of trying to scare the hell out of people so they’ll vote for you, or acquiesce to your destructive policies.
But I digress. There is a monstrous catastrophe not only headed our way, but actually already here. I’m not a climatologist, but my sense from paying attention to media reporting on this issue over the last two decades is that there is not only a one percent chance that global warming is both real and anthropogenic, but rather a ninety-five percent chance. Perhaps ninety-nine. Yep, sure, there are a few scientists out there still making the opposite argument. Probably some of them even aren’t on oil company payrolls! But the vast majority of reputable climate scientists now agree that this is happening, that we are making it happen, and that the results will be catastrophic. This, after ten and twenty years of a (somewhat) healthy scientific skepticism about those claims, which only further underscores the validity of the findings.
So what will they say about us five centuries from now - those very few, very toasty, remaining humans, living on mountain tops, the only dry land to be found? What they’ll say is probably unprintable in any family newspaper, that’s for sure. But in-between the expletives I think you’d be likely to find words like … “unconscionable” … “breathtakingly stupid” … “astonishingly selfish” … and, “If you weren’t already dead I’d kill you!”
Last week we had James Hansen reminding Congress, twenty years after originally doing so, of the gravity of this situation. One of the top scientists from one of America’s premier science agencies - who was told, by the way, to shut the hell up by the Bush administration - was reminding us yet again that we are facing mass species extinctions and ecosystem collapse among the lovely perils awaiting us if we continue in the current direction. Assuming, that is, that it isn’t already far too late to turn it around now.
Think about that for a second: Mass extinction. Ecosystem collapse. Meteor. Ninety-five or better percent chance.
Gay marriage.
Takes your breath right away, doesn’t it? There are certainly few better ways to underscore the full scope of the regressive nightmare haunting a country that likes to think of itself as the last, best hope of humanity. Fat chance of that. Indeed, we - or at least some of us - half-deserve this fate for choosing the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, DeLay, Scalia and the rest these last decades. It’s the rest of the world I feel especially sorry for. Last, best hope? Jeez, the mercury had already burst out squirting from the top of my irony thermometer seven years ago. Somehow I don’t think so. Well, maybe the ‘last’ part…
And what’s especially killer about this particular issue is the degree to which the multiple maladies and solutions all line up so neatly. Sometimes the cosmos sends you a message in very subtle ways. Other times it beats you over the head with a two-by-four. Occasionally, it detonates a small nuclear device in your backyard swimming pool to get your attention.
We’re very much in the latter category right now. You don’t exactly have to do a full and complete inventory to figure this one out. Here, just take this pop quiz. Quick, now: What factor do all of the following items have in common: massive environmental devastation, skyrocketing transportation and food prices, a declining middle-class with disappearing jobs, and a war-prone and constant calamity-threatening Middle East continually sucking in American military involvement and nightmarishly distorting our foreign policy? (If you’re somehow still struggling with this, you may want to consider spending a little more time catching up with current events. Meanwhile, though, here’s a bonus hint for you: Alan Greenspan described this as the real reason America went to war in Iraq.)
Did you get it?!?! Okay! A+ for you! Now flip it on it’s head. What would be a way in which our society could address the massive threats of global warming, a sinking middle class with lousy jobs, poverty-inducing energy costs and military nightmares in the Middle East, all at once? How about if we made it a giant national priority to wean ourselves off carbon-based energy sources through a variety of policies mixing incentives and regulations, and a huge national effort to develop alternative fuel sources, with all the industrial development and good-paying jobs associated with launching such industries? You know. What did Jimmy Carter call it, thirty freakin’ years ago? “The moral equivalent of war”, wasn’t it? Too bad he was a failed president, though. Hardly invaded any other countries. What could he possibly have known?
Seriously, though, here’s a chance to go from the all-wrong scenario of environmental destruction / energy dependence / Middle East war / horrific gas prices / recession / middle class decline, over to the all-right scenario of sustainability / energy independence / peace / reasonable energy costs / economic development / prosperity - all in one fell swoop. I mean, I know that regressives have a problem with any policies that actually make sense, and I know that Americans are just about the dumbest branch of the homo politicus family tree, but isn’t this a no-brainer so obvious that even people who actually have no brains could figure it out?
So, last week James Hansen reminded us that we are headed for such joyous ‘lifestyle changes’ as mass extinction and ecosystem collapse. Of course, most regressives continued to pooh-pooh such warnings as some sort of liberal conspiracy to undermine capitalism. I must say, these people blow me away with their unflinching and robotic dogmatism. I mean, I get why they insist on the Earth being only 6,000 years old and anything having to do with sex being a major sin. They’re incredibly frightened, and these beliefs bring the existential comfort of order to an otherwise messy and capricious universe. But what’s up with middle class fools ardently supporting tax cuts for the wealthy? Or any human being in the whole world denying the near unanimous testimony of scientific experts regarding a planetary threat, because oil companies told them to do so? Do climatologists seriously strike anybody as crypto-anarchists masquerading as scientists in order to destroy capitalism? (Listen to some regressive kooks talk about global warming and you could easily think so.) And, if that was really their goal, wouldn’t there be a lot easier ways to crash the system than to go spend years getting a PhD, do a bunch of boring research for low pay, and grade a million mind-numbing term papers written by a million grammatically-challenged college sophomores?
Then there’s that pesky little problem of evidence. Every week there’s more, though hardly any quite as egregious as what you could have seen on CNN.com just a few days ago: “North Pole Could Be Ice-Free This Summer, Scientists Say”. Woo-hoo. No worries there, eh? Now if Adam and Steve get married in California or Massachusetts, that’s something to get worked up about. But the destruction of the Arctic ice cap? We’ve already got polar bears in zoos, so what’s the big damn deal? Prolly it’ll be easier to get to the oil up there without all that ice in the way, anyhow.
What will they say - assuming there are any they left to be saying - in five centuries about us nice folks who managed to bequeath the solar system a second Mercury where a green and fertile planet once stood, just so we could party a little longer? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will be pretty. And I don’t think it will be, “Well, sure, they weren’t perfect. And, true, they wrecked the whole planet. But at least they kept boys from marrying other boys.”
These regressive fools and their pre-/anti-scientific religious superstitions just kill me.
And that’s just the problem. They’re killing all of us.
Praise the lord.
Echoes of Vietnam: VA Stalls, Dissembles While Vets Suffer and Die
Go to Original
By Penny Coleman
By Penny Coleman
On June 10, U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs back into court. Conti is presiding over a lawsuit brought by veterans against the VA, charging the agency with systematically denying veterans the services and support they so desperately need. Conti demanded that the VA explain why it had failed to produce certain critical (and incriminating) documents.
Among those documents was an e-mail written by the now-infamous Norma Perez. It read: "Given that we have more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, R/O [ruling out] PTSD."
Bob Filner, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said it was inconceivable that a low-level staffer like Perez could have written such an e-mail on her own authority. Barack Obama called it "unacceptable" and "tantamount to fraud." John McCain called it "not too important."
Lost somehow in the high-decibel rhetoric of the moment is a historical dimension of this story that I think deserves some attention. This is not the first time the VA has acted as adversary rather than advocate. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Max Cleland, then head of the VA, circulated an equally directive memo to his staff that read:
In view of the remaining uncertainties on the long-term effects of the defoliants, all VA personnel should avoid premature commitment to any diagnosis of defoliant poisoning. Similarly, entries in medical records should not contain statements about the relationship between a veteran’s illnesses and defoliant exposure unless unequivocal confirmation of such a connection has been established.
(The defoliants Cleland refers to were Agent Orange and other dioxin-based chemicals the United States sprayed over Vietnam.)
In the meantime, Cleland instructed VA staff to deny all Agent Orange claims. He also refused to undertake any kind of epidemiological study because, he claimed, the necessary outreach to veterans would only cause them "needless anxiety."
Then, as now, veterans’ "anxiety" was a hot topic at the VA. In testimony before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in February 1980, Cleland justified the agency’s practice of first, and often exclusively, giving veterans with dioxin-related symptoms psychiatric exams. Obviously, he explained to the committee, if "in FY 1979, 46 percent (of veterans) had received care for psychiatric disorders," that proved, ipso facto, that psychiatric care was what they needed. They were suffering from "post-Vietnam syndrome." All their symptoms were in their heads. Veterans tried to sue the VA over its "no health effects" policy, but the agency took the rather astonishing position that veterans had "no standing" to challenge the policies. They were allowed to sue the chemical manufacturers, but not the U.S. government, the entity that bought the poison and ordered it spread -- in concentrations four times that recommended for civilian use and with total disregard for the health and safety of its own soldiers and Vietnamese citizens. Veterans’ lawyers suggested that the VA’s position would lead "to a government of men, not law."
A prescient observation.
In a manner usually associated with totalitarian regimes, veterans were called "crazy" and thus dismissed, stigmatized and silenced. Paul Reutershan, who courageously initiated the class-action lawsuit against the chemical companies in 1978, told a television audience at the time, "My government killed me in Vietnam, and I didn’t even know it." Five months later, Reutershan was permanently silenced when he died of his illnesses. The longer the VA stalled, the more veterans died.
Reutershan was not, however, the original whistleblower. In 1977, Maude DeVictor, a VA caseworker in Chicago, began to notice a pattern of unusual birth defects in Vietnam veterans’ children. She began to keep a log of these cases, at least initially with her supervisors’ permission, accumulating a devastating, if circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting a strong link to dioxin poisoning. Suddenly, without explanation, her boss ordered her to stop. DeVictor decided to go to the media. On March 23, 1978, WBBM, the CBS television affiliate in Chicago, aired an hourlong documentary on the health effects of Agent Orange, including interviews with veterans and scientists. DeVictor was fired from her job and banned from full-time government work.
Which brings us back to today.
Veterans for Common Sense, one of the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit, called Judge Conti’s recent ruling "an important victory for veterans." And I suppose that it might be, if the VA can be forced to start doing its job. After seven years of preposterous, viciously cruel and far-too-often lethal gamesmanship, it would feel good to see the bad guys slapped around -- even just a little bit. And the fallout from such a court order, if one could be made binding, would certainly ease the betrayal and perhaps even the suffering of veterans. It might also help convince Americans that our big-stick militarism is a far more expensive solution to our international problems than they have been led to believe.
But what has really changed?
I find it deeply ironic that the very physical effects of dioxin were once dismissed as merely psychological, not compensable service-connected injuries. With the inclusion of posttraumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, such psychic injuries are acknowledged, yet the VA is still using the same tools of denial and obfuscation to refuse treatment to injured vets. The agency has proven itself over time to be far more committed to protecting the bottom line for "a government of men" than to protecting its rightful charges. Perhaps if the agency were no longer the fiefdom of political appointees, its policies would not be so predictably callous and politically expedient.
And where are the Maude DeVictors in this generation’s VA? How is it that policies are set and directives come down from above, stinking of injustice, and yet a staff that, at least in my experience, is largely made up of honorable, compassionate professionals carries them out without protest? Since this generation of soldiers began coming home, psychically injured in numbers never seen (or acknowledged?) before, a steadily increasing number of reports accuses the agency of everything from indifference to gross medical malfeasance. That’s corporate for "murder." The VA may be tantamount to a corporation, but those who individually carry out those policies and directives have also chosen. Like Maude DeVictor, they could have said no.
On the entrance to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Department of Veterans Affairs is a metal plaque that bears these words, taken from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan."
That plaque is an affront and an offense to those who have been so heartlessly treated, and someone should order it taken down. Or, maybe it’s time to take matters into our own hands. Maybe, to paraphrase Abbie Hoffman, it’s time to steal this plaque.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her website is Flashback.
Bush-Led 'Disaster Capitalism' Exploits Worldwide Misery to Make a Buck
Go to Original
By Naomi Klein
By Naomi Klein
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: "disaster capitalism." It usually goes well -- until it doesn’t.
For instance, "independent conservative" radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: "I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down," Doyle announced. "We’ve invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government ... . Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years."
There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: "We" are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.
It’s been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today’s preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.
And the disaster capitalists have been busy -- from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California’s wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress. The bill contains little in the way of affordable housing, shifts the burden of mortgage default to taxpayers and makes sure that the banks that made bad loans get some payouts. No wonder it is known in the hallways of Congress as "The Credit Suisse Plan," after one of the banks that generously proposed it.
Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It
But these cases of disaster capitalism are amateurish compared with what is unfolding at Iraq’s oil ministry. It started with no-bid service contracts announced for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies -- not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. As London-based oil expert Greg Muttitt points out, the contracts make sense only in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq’s oil fields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.
One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.
That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anticolonial struggles. According to Muttitt, the assumption until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop brand-new fields in Iraq -- not to take over ones that are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. "The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company," he told me. This is a total reversal of that policy, giving INOC a mere 25 percent instead of the planned 100 percent.
So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Ironically, it is Iraq’s suffering -- its never-ending crisis -- that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain its treasury of its main source of revenue. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology and the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that’s where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.
Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as "a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future." Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil under secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as "a primary objective."
Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure -- including its oil infrastructure -- is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.
Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again
Iraq isn’t the only country in the midst of an oil-related stickup. The Bush Administration is busily using a related crisis -- the soaring price of fuel -- to revive its dream of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And of drilling offshore. And in the rock-solid shale of the Green River Basin. "Congress must face a hard reality," said George W. Bush on June 18. "Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels -- or even higher -- our nation must produce more oil."
This is the President as Extortionist in Chief, with gas nozzle pointed to the head of his hostage -- which happens to be the entire country. Give me ANWR, or everyone has to spend their summer vacations in the backyard. A final stickup from the cowboy President.
Despite the Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less bumper stickers, drilling in ANWR would have little discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would "send a message" to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which would cause them to start betting down the price.
Two points follow from this approach. First, trying to psych out hyperactive commodity traders is what passes for governing in the Bush era, even in the midst of a national emergency. Second, it will never work. If there is one thing we can predict from the oil market’s recent behavior, it is that the price is going to keep going up regardless of what new supplies are announced.
Take the massive oil boom under way in Alberta’s notorious tar sands. The tar sands (sometimes called the oil sands) have the same things going for them as Bush’s proposed drill sites: they are nearby and perfectly secure, since the North American Free Trade Agreement contains a provision barring Canada from cutting off supply to the United States. And with little fanfare, oil from this largely untapped source has been pouring into the market, so much so that Canada is now the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Between 2005 and 2007, Canada increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels. Yet despite this significant increase in secure supplies, oil prices have been going up the entire time.
What is driving the ANWR push is not facts but pure shock doctrine strategy -- the oil crisis has created the conditions in which it is possible to sell a previously unsellable (but highly profitable) policy.
Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation
Intimately connected to the price of oil is the global food crisis. Not only do high gas prices drive up food costs but the boom in agrofuels has blurred the line between food and fuel, pushing food growers off their land and encouraging rampant speculation. Several Latin American countries have been pushing to re-examine the push for agrofuels and to have food recognized as a human right, not a mere commodity. United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has other ideas. In the same speech touting the US commitment to emergency food aid, he called on countries to lower their "export restrictions and high tariffs" and eliminate "barriers to use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology." This was an admittedly more subtle stickup, but the message was clear: impoverished countries had better crack open their agricultural markets to American products and genetically modified seeds, or they could risk having their aid cut off.
Genetically modified crops have emerged as the cureall for the food crisis, at least according to the World Bank, the European Commission president (time to "bite the bullet") and Prime Minister of Britain Gordon Brown. And, of course, the agribusiness companies. "You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms," Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, told the Financial Times recently. The problem with this argument, at least for now, is that there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them.
But even if there was a simple key to solving the global food crisis, would we really want it in the hands of the Nestlés and Monsantos? What would it cost us to use it? In recent months Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF have been frenetically buying up patents on so-called "climate ready" seeds -- plants that can grow in earth parched from drought and salinated from flooding.
In other words, plants built to survive a future of climate chaos. We already know the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its intellectual property, spying on and suing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one year to the next. We have seen patented AIDS medications fail to treat millions in sub-Saharan Africa. Why would patented "climate ready" crops be any different?
Meanwhile, amid all the talk of exciting new genetic and drilling technologies, the Bush Administration announced a moratorium of up to two years on new solar energy projects on federal lands -- due, apparently, to environmental concerns. This is the final frontier for disaster capitalism. Our leaders are failing to invest in technology that will actually prevent a future of climate chaos, choosing instead to work hand in hand with those plotting innovative schemes to profit from the mayhem.
Privatizing Iraq’s oil, ensuring global dominance for genetically modified crops, lowering the last of the trade barriers and opening the last of the wildlife refuges ... Not so long ago, those goals were pursued through polite trade agreements, under the benign pseudonym "globalization." Now this discredited agenda is forced to ride on the backs of serial crises, selling itself as lifesaving medicine for a world in pain.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Vendor Misinformation in the E-Voting World
Go to Original
By Dan Wallach
This article was posted at Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony). I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different. This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports. I was part of the Hart InterCivic source code team for California’s analysis. I knew the problems. I was prepared to discuss them at length.
Wow, was I disappointed. Here’s a quote from Peter Lichtenheld, speaking on behalf of Hart InterCivic:
Did our work cast light on questions of security? Our work found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of “viral” attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. In effect, one attacker, corrupting one machine, could arrange for every voting system in the county to be corrupt in the subsequent election. That’s a big deal.
Can an attacker learn enough about these machines to construct the attacks we described in our report? This sort of thing would need to be done in private, where a team of smart attackers could carefully reverse engineer the machine and piece together the attack. I’ll estimate that it would take a group of four talented people, working full time, two to three months of effort to do it. Once. After that, you’ve got your evil attack software, ready to go, with only minutes of effort to boot a single eSlate, install the malicious software patch, and then it’s off to the races. The attack would only need to be installed on a single eSlate per county in order to spread to every other eSlate. The election professionals and procedures would be helpless to prevent it. (Hart has a “hash code testing” mechanism that’s meant to determine if an eSlate is running authentic software, but it’s trivial to defeat. See issues 9 through 12 in our report.)
What about auditing, reconciliation, “logic and accuracy” testing, and other related procedures? Again, all easily defeated by a sophisticated attacker. Generally speaking, there are several different kinds of tests that DRE systems support. “Self-tests” are trivial for malicious software to detect, allowing the malicious software to either disable and fake the test results, or simply behave correctly. Most “logic and accuracy” tests boil down to casting a handful of votes for each candidate and then doing a tally. Malicious software might simply behave correctly until more than a handful of votes have been received. Likewise, malicious software might just look at the clock and behave correctly unless it’s the proper election day. Parallel testing is about pulling machines out of service and casting what appears to be completely normal votes on them while the real election is ongoing. This may or may not detect malicious software, but nobody in Texas does parallel testing. Auditing and reconciliation are all about comparing different records of the same event. If you’ve got a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) attachment to a DRE, then you could compare it with the electronic records. Texas has not yet certified any VVPAT printers, so those won’t help here. (The VVPAT printers sold by current DRE vendors have other problems, but that’s a topic for another day.) The “redundant” memories in the DREs are all that you’ve got left to audit or reconcile. Our work shows how this redundancy is unhelpful against security threats; malicious code will simply modify all of the copies in synchrony.
Later, the Hart representative remarked:
What’s it all mean? Unsurprisingly, the vendors and their trade organization are spinning the results of these studies, as best they can, in an attempt to downplay their significance. Hopefully, legislators and election administrators are smart enough to grasp the vendors’ behavior for what it actually is and take appropriate steps to bolster our election integrity.
Until then, the bottom line is that many jurisdictions in Texas and elsewhere in the country will be using e-voting equipment this November with known security vulnerabilities, and the procedures and controls they are using will not be sufficient to either prevent or detect sophisticated attacks on their e-voting equipment. While there are procedures with the capability to detect many of these attacks (e.g., post-election auditing of voter-verified paper records), Texas has not certified such equipment for use in the state. Texas’s DREs are simply vulnerable to and undefended against attacks.
By Dan Wallach
This article was posted at Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony). I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different. This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports. I was part of the Hart InterCivic source code team for California’s analysis. I knew the problems. I was prepared to discuss them at length.
Wow, was I disappointed. Here’s a quote from Peter Lichtenheld, speaking on behalf of Hart InterCivic:
Security reviews of the Hart system as tested in California, Colorado, and Ohio were conducted by people who were given unfettered access to code, equipment, tools and time and they had no threat model. While this may provide some information about system architecture in a way that casts light on questions of security, it should not be mistaken for a realistic approximation of what happens in an election environment. In a realistic election environment, the technology is enhanced by elections professionals and procedures, and those professionals safeguard equipment and passwords, and physical barriers are there to inhibit tampering. Additionally, jurisdiction ballot count, audit, and reconciliation processes safeguard against voter fraud.You can find the whole hearing online (via RealAudio streaming), where you will hear the Diebold/Premier representative, as well as David Beirne, the director of their trade organization, saying essentially the same thing. Since this seems to be the voting system vendors’ party line, let’s spend some time analyzing it.
Did our work cast light on questions of security? Our work found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of “viral” attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. In effect, one attacker, corrupting one machine, could arrange for every voting system in the county to be corrupt in the subsequent election. That’s a big deal.
At this point, the scientific evidence is in, it’s overwhelming, and it’s indisputable. The current generation of DRE voting systems have a wide variety of dangerous security flaws. There’s simply no justification for the vendors to be making excuses or otherwise downplaying the clear scientific consensus on the quality of their products.
Were we given unfettered access? The big difference between what we had and what an attacker might have is that we had some (but not nearly all) source code to the system. An attacker who arranged for some equipment to “fall off the back of a truck” would be able to extract all of the software, in binary form, and then would need to go through a tedious process of reverse engineering before reaching parity with the access we had. The lack of source code has demonstrably failed to do much to slow down attackers who find holes in other commercial software products. Debugging and decompilation tools are really quite sophisticated these days. All this means is that an attacker would need additional time to do the same work that we did.
Did we have a threat model? Absolutely! See chapter three of our report, conveniently titled “Threat Model.” The different teams working on the top to bottom report collaborated together to draft this chapter. It talks about attackers’ goals, levels of access, and different variations on how sophisticated an attacker might be. It is hard to accept that the vendors can get away with claiming that the reports did not have a threat model, when a simple check of the table of contents of the reports disproves their claim.
Was our work a “realistic approximation” of what happens in a real election? When the vendors call our work “unrealistic”, they usually mean one of two things:
1. Real attackers couldn’t discover these vulnerabilitiesBoth of these arguments are wrong. In real elections, individual voting machines are not terribly well safeguarded. In a studio where I take swing dance lessons, I found a rack of eSlates two weeks after the election in which they were used. They were in their normal cases. There were no security seals. (I didn’t touch them, but I did have a very good look around.) That’s more than sufficient access for an attacker wanting to tamper with a voting machine. Likewise, Ed Felten has a series of Tinker posts about unguarded voting machines in Princeton.
2. The attackers can’t be exploited in the real world.
Can an attacker learn enough about these machines to construct the attacks we described in our report? This sort of thing would need to be done in private, where a team of smart attackers could carefully reverse engineer the machine and piece together the attack. I’ll estimate that it would take a group of four talented people, working full time, two to three months of effort to do it. Once. After that, you’ve got your evil attack software, ready to go, with only minutes of effort to boot a single eSlate, install the malicious software patch, and then it’s off to the races. The attack would only need to be installed on a single eSlate per county in order to spread to every other eSlate. The election professionals and procedures would be helpless to prevent it. (Hart has a “hash code testing” mechanism that’s meant to determine if an eSlate is running authentic software, but it’s trivial to defeat. See issues 9 through 12 in our report.)
What about auditing, reconciliation, “logic and accuracy” testing, and other related procedures? Again, all easily defeated by a sophisticated attacker. Generally speaking, there are several different kinds of tests that DRE systems support. “Self-tests” are trivial for malicious software to detect, allowing the malicious software to either disable and fake the test results, or simply behave correctly. Most “logic and accuracy” tests boil down to casting a handful of votes for each candidate and then doing a tally. Malicious software might simply behave correctly until more than a handful of votes have been received. Likewise, malicious software might just look at the clock and behave correctly unless it’s the proper election day. Parallel testing is about pulling machines out of service and casting what appears to be completely normal votes on them while the real election is ongoing. This may or may not detect malicious software, but nobody in Texas does parallel testing. Auditing and reconciliation are all about comparing different records of the same event. If you’ve got a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) attachment to a DRE, then you could compare it with the electronic records. Texas has not yet certified any VVPAT printers, so those won’t help here. (The VVPAT printers sold by current DRE vendors have other problems, but that’s a topic for another day.) The “redundant” memories in the DREs are all that you’ve got left to audit or reconcile. Our work shows how this redundancy is unhelpful against security threats; malicious code will simply modify all of the copies in synchrony.
Later, the Hart representative remarked:
This line of argument depends on the fact that most of Hart’s customers will never bother to read our actual report. As it turns out, this was largely true in the initial rules from the CA Secretary of State, but you need to read the current rules, which were released several months later. The new rules, in light of the viral threat against Hart systems, requires the back-end system (”SERVO”) to be rebooted after each and every eSlate is connected to it. That’s hardly “as-is”. If you have thousands of eSlates, properly managing an election with them will be exceptionally painful. If you only have one eSlate per precinct, as California required for the other vendors, with most votes cast on optical-scanned paper ballots, you would have a much more manageable election.The Hart system is the only system approved as-is for the November 2007 general election after the top to bottom review in California.
What’s it all mean? Unsurprisingly, the vendors and their trade organization are spinning the results of these studies, as best they can, in an attempt to downplay their significance. Hopefully, legislators and election administrators are smart enough to grasp the vendors’ behavior for what it actually is and take appropriate steps to bolster our election integrity.
Until then, the bottom line is that many jurisdictions in Texas and elsewhere in the country will be using e-voting equipment this November with known security vulnerabilities, and the procedures and controls they are using will not be sufficient to either prevent or detect sophisticated attacks on their e-voting equipment. While there are procedures with the capability to detect many of these attacks (e.g., post-election auditing of voter-verified paper records), Texas has not certified such equipment for use in the state. Texas’s DREs are simply vulnerable to and undefended against attacks.
Bush's Dollar Drop Maps Loss of U.S. Clout at Final G-8 Summit
Go to Original
By James G. Neuger
When President George W. Bush went to his first Group of Eight summit in 2001, a dominant issue was the dollar -- the strong dollar, that is. The U.S. currency was on a record-setting streak, and the free-marketeering president wasn't going to stand in the way.
On the eve of Bush's last G-8 appearance, the dollar's gyrations are again in the crossfire. This time, it is a weak currency, upended by slumping growth, a housing recession and record gas prices, that is gnawing away at the world economy.
The dollar's 41 percent drop against the euro during Bush's term writes the economic epitaph of an administration that set out to restore American preeminence. Instead, Bush heads to Japan next week for his final international summit with diminished leverage as Russian and Chinese influence grows.
``Between the economic duress facing the United States and the global community at large and the fact that the clock is running out on the Bush administration, Bush does not hold a good hand,'' said Charles Kupchan, an international-relations professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He called the summit a ``damage-limitation'' exercise to show the world that governments are trying to contain food and oil prices.
Global economic-confidence building crowds the agenda at the three-day summit starting July 7 in Toyako, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, that was meant to tackle climate change, recommit the rich world to development aid for Africa and strengthen nuclear non-proliferation controls.
Growth Lags
Bush represents the worst-performing economy in the G-8 after Italy, with growth of 0.5 percent this year set to lag behind 1.6 percent in the U.K., 1.4 percent in the euro area, 1.4 percent in Japan and 1.3 percent in Canada, according to International Monetary Fund forecasts.
Russia, brought into the G-8 by Bill Clinton in 1998, will eclipse the rest of the club with growth of 6.8 percent this year, the IMF says. Russia's oil and commodity wealth puts it at odds with the western goal of cutting reliance on fossil fuels. China, seen expanding 9.3 percent, has also frustrated the fight against global warming by locking up energy deals in Africa to slake its economic thirst. China will be among eight non-G-8 members that take part on the summit's last day.
America's economic woes with $4-a-gallon gasoline prices will stiffen Bush's opposition to European and Japanese calls for binding, quantifiable targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, blamed by scientists for pushing up global temperatures.
Global Warming
Bush took a baby step at last year's G-8 by acknowledging the need to do something about global warming, edging the U.S. away from the laissez-faire approach that he championed after pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto climate-protection protocol in a move that met international condemnation in 2001.
With the countdown under way to the presidency of Barack Obama or John McCain, the most the summit can do is set up a framework for pollution-cutting agreements that replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, said Reginald Dale, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
``Most of Bush's partners are looking to the next president,'' Dale said. European leaders will ``be trying to pin Bush further down on the nature of commitments that the United States might undertake to reduce emissions in the shorter term.''
Europe's Bind
Europe is caught in a bind of its own. Soaring fuel prices and a chorus of protests put pressure on leaders to offer relief instead of weaning consumers away from fossil fuels. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, holder of the 27-nation European Union's six-month presidency, is pressing for fuel-tax cuts.
Oil prices continued climbing after pressure by European leaders including Britain's Gordon Brown led Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, to announce for July the third straight monthly increase in production.
``There's no hope for new achievements or concrete results regarding crude-oil prices or the shortage of food or global warming,'' said Koichi Kato, a senior member of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Spiraling food and fuel costs are hitting poorer countries the hardest, increasing the pressure on the G-8 to make good on a 2005 pledge to double development aid to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010 and to implement last year's promise to invest $60 billion worldwide to combat deadly diseases.
Price Surge
G-8 finance ministers last month identified surging commodities prices as a bigger threat than the credit squeeze to the world economy. Prices for 19 commodities in the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index rose 29 percent in the first half, the most since 1973. Rice, corn and wheat futures have all touched records this year.
Sagging faith in the dollar -- it now makes up 63 percent of global currency reserves, down from 71 percent when Bush took office -- complicates efforts to tame commodity prices because they are primarily denominated in the U.S. currency.
America's dependence on imported capital to finance a $9.5 trillion debt -- up from $5.7 trillion when Bush took office -- has driven down the currency. The decline was accelerated by the subprime crisis that plunged the U.S. into an economic tailspin.
``If Bush could get others at the G-8 summit to demand a stronger dollar he'd have done a final good after a lot of negatives over the years,'' said Uwe von Parpart, chief Asia strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald LP in Hong Kong. ``Dollar strengthening appears to be the only thing capable of containing or pushing back oil prices.''
Speaking at the White House yesterday, Bush tried to give the markets a nudge: ``We're strong dollar people in this administration and have always been for the strong dollar.''
By James G. Neuger
When President George W. Bush went to his first Group of Eight summit in 2001, a dominant issue was the dollar -- the strong dollar, that is. The U.S. currency was on a record-setting streak, and the free-marketeering president wasn't going to stand in the way.
On the eve of Bush's last G-8 appearance, the dollar's gyrations are again in the crossfire. This time, it is a weak currency, upended by slumping growth, a housing recession and record gas prices, that is gnawing away at the world economy.
The dollar's 41 percent drop against the euro during Bush's term writes the economic epitaph of an administration that set out to restore American preeminence. Instead, Bush heads to Japan next week for his final international summit with diminished leverage as Russian and Chinese influence grows.
``Between the economic duress facing the United States and the global community at large and the fact that the clock is running out on the Bush administration, Bush does not hold a good hand,'' said Charles Kupchan, an international-relations professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He called the summit a ``damage-limitation'' exercise to show the world that governments are trying to contain food and oil prices.
Global economic-confidence building crowds the agenda at the three-day summit starting July 7 in Toyako, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, that was meant to tackle climate change, recommit the rich world to development aid for Africa and strengthen nuclear non-proliferation controls.
Growth Lags
Bush represents the worst-performing economy in the G-8 after Italy, with growth of 0.5 percent this year set to lag behind 1.6 percent in the U.K., 1.4 percent in the euro area, 1.4 percent in Japan and 1.3 percent in Canada, according to International Monetary Fund forecasts.
Russia, brought into the G-8 by Bill Clinton in 1998, will eclipse the rest of the club with growth of 6.8 percent this year, the IMF says. Russia's oil and commodity wealth puts it at odds with the western goal of cutting reliance on fossil fuels. China, seen expanding 9.3 percent, has also frustrated the fight against global warming by locking up energy deals in Africa to slake its economic thirst. China will be among eight non-G-8 members that take part on the summit's last day.
America's economic woes with $4-a-gallon gasoline prices will stiffen Bush's opposition to European and Japanese calls for binding, quantifiable targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, blamed by scientists for pushing up global temperatures.
Global Warming
Bush took a baby step at last year's G-8 by acknowledging the need to do something about global warming, edging the U.S. away from the laissez-faire approach that he championed after pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto climate-protection protocol in a move that met international condemnation in 2001.
With the countdown under way to the presidency of Barack Obama or John McCain, the most the summit can do is set up a framework for pollution-cutting agreements that replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, said Reginald Dale, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
``Most of Bush's partners are looking to the next president,'' Dale said. European leaders will ``be trying to pin Bush further down on the nature of commitments that the United States might undertake to reduce emissions in the shorter term.''
Europe's Bind
Europe is caught in a bind of its own. Soaring fuel prices and a chorus of protests put pressure on leaders to offer relief instead of weaning consumers away from fossil fuels. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, holder of the 27-nation European Union's six-month presidency, is pressing for fuel-tax cuts.
Oil prices continued climbing after pressure by European leaders including Britain's Gordon Brown led Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, to announce for July the third straight monthly increase in production.
``There's no hope for new achievements or concrete results regarding crude-oil prices or the shortage of food or global warming,'' said Koichi Kato, a senior member of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Spiraling food and fuel costs are hitting poorer countries the hardest, increasing the pressure on the G-8 to make good on a 2005 pledge to double development aid to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010 and to implement last year's promise to invest $60 billion worldwide to combat deadly diseases.
Price Surge
G-8 finance ministers last month identified surging commodities prices as a bigger threat than the credit squeeze to the world economy. Prices for 19 commodities in the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index rose 29 percent in the first half, the most since 1973. Rice, corn and wheat futures have all touched records this year.
Sagging faith in the dollar -- it now makes up 63 percent of global currency reserves, down from 71 percent when Bush took office -- complicates efforts to tame commodity prices because they are primarily denominated in the U.S. currency.
America's dependence on imported capital to finance a $9.5 trillion debt -- up from $5.7 trillion when Bush took office -- has driven down the currency. The decline was accelerated by the subprime crisis that plunged the U.S. into an economic tailspin.
``If Bush could get others at the G-8 summit to demand a stronger dollar he'd have done a final good after a lot of negatives over the years,'' said Uwe von Parpart, chief Asia strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald LP in Hong Kong. ``Dollar strengthening appears to be the only thing capable of containing or pushing back oil prices.''
Speaking at the White House yesterday, Bush tried to give the markets a nudge: ``We're strong dollar people in this administration and have always been for the strong dollar.''
Hitchens Gets Waterboarded, Withdraws from Iraq in 11 Seconds
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By John Dolan
By John Dolan
Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!
Hitchens announced the news like he’d brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it’s torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it’s "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens’ tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since "9½ Weeks."
Hitchens’ video is totally fake -- there’s even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist’s office, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.
Of course if Hitchens had been a real Iraqi suspect, they’d never have had to waterboard him at all. They do that to tough suspects, not wimps like him. In a real torture cell, everything would be a lot tougher from the start. For example, Chris wouldn’t be in the nice dress shirt and slacks he’s wearing on the video. He’d be naked -- a gross image, what a lifetime of booze and lying does to the body, but we have to be hard-nosed here -- because keeping the prisoner naked is basic interrogation strategy, especially with a culture as horrified of gettin’ nekkid as Arabs are. You’ll recall that in those Abu Ghraib pictures, the prisoners were naked.
So that’s fake already, and the video gets faker as it goes. The guys "interrogating" him are fat, middle-aged, mild-mannered dudes. They don’t even yell at him. A real suspect in Iraq would be snatched off the street, smacked around until he passes out, stripped and dumped into a cell with a hood over his head. He wouldn’t be able to sleep off his misery, either, because sleep deprivation is one of the oldest, most effective tortures. The interrogators would maintain this schedule for hours, days, weeks, depending on how well and how soon the victim breaks down. When they think he’s ready -- like, they notice with satisfaction that he screams like a steam whistle every time he hears footsteps in the corridor -- they drag him out of his cell and strap him onto that waterboarding table.
Well, Chris is a busy man and didn’t have time for all that background research, so what you see in this video is a guy who hasn’t been so much as slapped or yelled at. Who probably just finished a 10-martini lunch at some upscale restaurant. That’s ridiculous enough, but the interrogators make it even more ridiculous with their little introduction to the torture session. One guy says, "All right, listen up, I’m going to give you some instructions ..." Then he tells the fat man on the table, "We’re going to place metal objects in each of your hands," and if he feels "unbearable stress" at any time, all he has to do is drop the objects and they’ll stop.
I’ve had dentists who did root canals on me without being that nice; they stuck to "this is going to hurt." More to the point here, putting the victim in "unbearable stress" is, uh, the whole point of torture, or "extreme interrogation," or whatever you want to call it. The last thing you’d ever do is give the victim a sense of power, like he can stop the process by dropping a "metal object" on the floor.
That kind of etiquette is what you get from those expensive dominatrixes English dudes like to get whipped by, or those nerf BDSM sites that talk about "consensual power exchanges." What reminded me most of those BDSM sites is the "code word" they tell Hitchens he can use to stop the waterboarding: "That word is red, R-E-D." They ask him if he understands and he says, "Yes, sir." That "sir" only added to the ridiculous porn feel here, like Hitchens was paying a hundred pounds an hour to have Baron Whipsong or Lady Cruella, whichever way he likes it, wear out their riding crop on his eager little bum.
The real thing isn’t nearly so nice. After you’ve been beaten on bruises (which hurt more each time) for a few days, they slam the cell door open, screaming abuse at you, kick you to your feet and take you down the corridor, slamming your head into the walls as often as they feel like it, and strap you down. And all the time they’re screaming: "OK, you worthless (Arabic obscenity here) -- We’re through with you! We don’t even want you any more! Ever drown before, (obscenity)? Ever go swimming head-first, (obscenity)?"
If you remember "The Big Lebowski," you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn’s yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude’s hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, "Where’s the money, Lebowski? Where’s the money, shithead?" See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.
But all that niceness doesn’t matter once the torturer’s helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch’s face. The "metal object," whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he’s OK. That’s also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who’s been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It’s not just the pain, it’s the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It’s like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.
So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer’s easy: He’s withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it’s too late. Karl Rove won’t be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we’re actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o’-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.
That’s all it takes to change anybody’s mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it’s nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it’s the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds.
Global food price rises exacerbate famine in Ethiopia and Somalia
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By Barry Mason
By Barry Mason
It is not unusual for Ethiopia and Somalia to be hit by drought and food shortages, but this year the rise in food costs makes an already disastrous situation worse.
In Ethiopia, the area affected is in the triangle of land in the east and southeast bordering Kenya and Somalia, comprising the Somalia, Oromiya and Amhara regions. According to Reuters, a NASA earth observatory picture taken from space shows the “eastern half of the country withered in drought.”
Around 4.5 million Ethiopians are in need of food aid, with as many as 75,000 children facing acute malnutrition and illness.
Ken Caldwell, international operations director for the charity Save the Children, explained, “Hunger hits children first and hits them hardest. Ethiopian children, who are going hungry because their parents can’t afford to feed them, will be among the first victims of the global food price rises.”
As in previous years the impact of a poor belg rainfall (the belg rains fall March to May) has left the area to be classified by FEWSNET (famine early warning network) as either “highly” or “extremely” food-insecure.
A Reuters report of June 13 quoted Elisabeth Byrs, of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“Seasonal rains have been poor or have failed in many parts of Ethiopia with dramatic effects on harvests in crop-producing areas,” she explained, and the effects of the drought had doubled the numbers needing food aid.
All the NGOs working in Ethiopia repeat the danger to children. The American-based CHF International explains how the drought’s effect on livestock means that milk production has almost ceased, and that this is having a marked impact on children’s nutrition.
The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), in a press release of June 5, said, “Since MSF started its intervention in this region on 13 May, over 700 children with complicated severe malnutrition...have been admitted to its three stabilisation centres. In addition more than 1,500 other malnourished children are being treated as outpatients in eight clinics around the region. In Ethiopia around 7 million people routinely rely on food aid—malnutrition is nothing new. However, this year, the situation is much worse.... An MSF emergency nutritional project will generally be started if a rate of 3 percent severe acute malnutrition is found in a certain area. In some places in Ethiopia, recent assessments revealed a rate of 11 percent.”
The UN has launched an appeal for US$325 million to provide 400,000 tonnes of food aid in Ethiopia. The fact that just two months ago the UN estimated around US$70 million was needed shows the rapidly increasing severity of the situation.
One indication of the impact of rising food prices and the weakening of the Ethiopian currency is a statement by the UN that staple food costs nearly four times more than a year ago.
The NGOs, as well as pointing to the longer term factors—the impact of climate change making droughts more frequent and the reduced agricultural output resulting from IMF-World Bank economic programmes—also highlight massive food price rises.
Care International on its website comments: “The situation in Ethiopia is not only due to the current drought but a combination of additional factors including dwindling natural resources and agricultural productivity due to the effects of climate change.... For millions of people, there just isn’t food available, but in many cases even food is for sale on local markets, the price is so exorbitant that poor people simply can’t afford to pay”.
Francois Calas, MSF head of mission, explained that whilst the failure of the early belg rains had initiated the famine, “other factors such as high rates of inflation and an increase in food prices have also played a part. For most people life here is a daily struggle and for many of them this year that struggle became too much to bear.”
In Ethiopia, as in most African countries, agriculture has been seriously set back over the last three decades by IMF-World Bank free-market policies as well as by the influx of subsidised US and European Union food production after local markets have been forced open by the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Agriculture.
A recent article entitled “Destroying African Agriculture” by Walden Bello in Foreign Policy in Focus is an indictment of the impact of Western policies. He writes, “African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base. At the time of decolonisation in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter... Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer.... [S]tructural adjustment saddled Africa with low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output, all combining to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline.”
He continues, “According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between1981 and 2001.... [S]tructural adjustment [has had the effect of] severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency.”
Neighbouring Somalia has also been hit by drought, but here the situation is made seriously worse by the invasion of US-backed Ethiopian troops coming to the rescue of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). For the last year and a half, they have attempted to drive out the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) that ruled the capital Mogadishu and large parts of Somalia during 2006. The ICU drove out the warlords that preyed on the civilian population, many of whom are allied to the TFG. Washington, which claimed that the ICU contained Al Qaeda members, has justified the invasion and subsequent atrocities on the grounds of pursuing the “war on terror.”
The UN has warned that the number of people needing emergency food relief in Somalia is likely to increase by nearly a third to 3.5 million in the next three months.
Few NGOs now risk working in Somalia. Medecins Sans Frontieres had four of its aid workers killed this year but continues to operate in 12 locations through local people. Its latest report on the situation in Hawa Afdi, on the road between Mogadishu and Afgooye where many have fled the fighting in the capital, reports a 400 percent increase in the number of children under five suffering malnutrition.
“Between 13 and 19 June, over 500 children under five years’ old were admitted to this nutritional programme [in Hawa Afdi], suffering from acute malnutrition,” MSF reports. In the Mogadishu-to-Afgooye corridor, more than 250,000 people are now living in extremely crowded conditions, with their number steadily increasing as they flee the fighting in the capital.
MSF states that in all its 12 locations, “we have seen a drastic deterioration in the health situation over the last year, and increases in malnutrition over the last three months.” It also points to the issue of the increasing prices of staple foods, explaining that “Some items have risen by up to 200 percent since the beginning of this year.” Food price rises have been compounded by the devaluation of the currency by 80 percent between April 2007 and 2008.
Bush administration settles Hatfill suit, buries anthrax investigation
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By Patrick Martin
The Bush administration agreed June 27 to pay nearly $6 million to biological-weapons expert Steven J. Hatfill in return for ending a lawsuit against the Justice Department. Hatfill filed the suit after top government officials named him a “person of interest” in the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks that killed five people and spread panic in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The agreement does not free the scientist of suspicion, although it makes it highly unlikely that he could ever be prosecuted if he actually had any connection to the attacks. The Department of Justice admitted no liability in relation to Hatfill, and a spokesman said that the settlement was agreed “in the best interests of the United States.”
Hatfill was the subject of intense media attention for more than a year, and was fired from a job at Louisiana State University because of FBI pressure. He will receive a lump-sum payment of $2.825 million, as well as an annuity that will pay him another $3 million, or $150,000 a year over the next 20 years.
One consequence of the deal is that the ongoing federal case against former USA Today journalist Toni Locy is likely to be quashed. Locy was subpoenaed by Hatfill’s attorneys, who demanded to know the sources for several articles she had written about the case. Locy refused to comply, citing journalistic confidentiality, but was facing $5,000 per day fines imposed by US District Judge Reggie Walton. The fines were stayed while Locy’s appeal worked its way through the courts.
Hatfill also sued the New York Times and columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote extensively on the case in 2002 and was the first to report Hatfill’s identity, but that case was thrown out by the courts last year.
Judge Walton has been increasingly critical of the government case against Hatfill, declaring at a hearing earlier this year, after he had reviewed still-secret internal FBI memos about the anthrax investigation, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.”
One of Hatfill’s lawyers, Mark Grannis, told the press, “The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who’s been horribly abused can go to a judge and say ‘I need your help,’ and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice.”
Actually, the United States is not such a country. The cash windfall for the former “person of interest” is in sharp contrast to the treatment the Bush administration routinely deals out to terrorism suspects who are not, like Hatfill, veterans of Green Beret training with ultra-right political associations and reported connections to US intelligence services.
If Hatfill had been a Muslim or an immigrant from the Middle East, he would have been arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement, and denied access to a lawyer or to the media. Instead, he walks away with one of the biggest financial awards ever issued for government misconduct.
The US government has not paid a dime in compensation to innocent victims of the CIA’s rendition program, like Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti descent who was kidnapped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia, shipped to Afghanistan, abused for five months, then released when the agency realized it had seized the wrong man. Nor has anything been paid to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, grabbed at Kennedy International Airport while changing planes, transported to Syria and tortured there for months, also eventually released without any charges against him.
Instead of paying them millions of dollars, the Bush administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to bar either victim from suing in US courts over their kidnapping, illegal imprisonment and torture.
Then there is the example of Ali Marri, a Qatari national and US resident, studying at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he lived with his wife and five children. Marri has been held in a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina since 2003 on unspecified terrorism charges. The Bush administration maintains that it has the power to seize an immigrant living legally in the United States, and hold him indefinitely in a military prison without any legal recourse whatsoever.
All three cases have one thing in common: there is far less evidence against any of the prisoners, one still held by the US government, than there was against Hatfill, who was never arrested and has not spent a single day behind bars.
The anthrax investigation is reputedly one of the largest and most wide-ranging ever conducted by the FBI, with thousands of interviews and inquiries, dozens of searches, and zero progress. The dead end is all the more remarkable because independent scientific experts have maintained that the anthrax used in the deadly mailings in the fall of 2001 could only have been obtained by someone with biological warfare expertise and access to US biological weapons testing facilities, particularly the lab at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where Hatfill once worked. The universe of possible suspects has been estimated at between 20 and 250 people.
Hatfill came to the attention of the Justice Department, and ultimately of the media, because of several curious facts in his career. After US military service, he attended the University of Zimbabwe when the country was still under white minority rule, taking a medical degree.
Kristof raised some logical questions in his New York Times column in 2002, where he referred to Hatfill as “Mr. Z.” He wrote (in the form of questions to the government investigators): “Have you examined whether Mr. Z. has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z. has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks? Mr. Z’s resume also claims involvement in the former South African Defense Force; all else aside, who knew that the US Defense Department would pick an American who had served in the armed forces of two white-racist regimes to work in the American biodefense program with some of the world’s deadliest germs?”
While in Zimbabwe, moreover, Hatfill had lived near a Greendale School, the fake return address used in the anthrax mailings to Congress. He had a grievance against the government because the Pentagon had revoked his security clearance on August 23, 2001, and he was later fired from his job at a defense contractor as a result. Investigators also discovered that Hatfill had penned an unpublished novel that centers on a lone terrorist attacking Congress using plague bacteria. These may just be strange coincidences, but they are many.
Even more significant is the evident right-wing political motivation behind the anthrax attacks. They served two purposes: in general, to spread fear and panic after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and in particular, to intimidate the leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress, and sections of media demonized by the far-right as “liberal,” such as NBC News.
The mailings went to the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, as well as to the office of NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, and to the company that owns the National Enquirer tabloid. As the WSWS wrote at the time, after the source of the anthrax was positively identified: “The Democratic Party leadership was targeted for assassination using weapons produced by (or stolen from) the American military itself. The whole affair exudes the stench of an attempted political coup.”
Sections of the ultra-right media, particularly the Wall Street Journal, sought to dismiss the significance of the targeting of congressional Democrats, claiming that the FBI was mistaken in concluding that the attack was of domestic origins and suggesting that Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein were responsible. The Journal continues to take this line today, depicting the payoff to Hatfill as a vindication of its initial criticism.
The Journal makes no mention of another curious fact, uncovered by the right-wing Judicial Watch group, in the course of a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Bush administration: the White House staff were all issued tablets of Cipro, which protects against anthrax, on September 11, 2001—more than three weeks before the first mailings arrived in Florida and on Capitol Hill. Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch declared, in a press statement, “We believe that the White House knew or had reason to know that an anthrax attack was imminent or underway.”
Not only the investigation into the anthrax attacks, but the settlement with Hatfill itself has a politically compromised character. Besides ensuring that the former military bioweapons expert has an incentive to keep silent on whatever he may know about the 2001 events, the payoff may be an effort to dispose of the case before a change of administration in Washington.
Former senator Daschle, one of the main targets of the anthrax mailings, is a leading figure in the Obama campaign, and many of his former staffers, including those who were in the office the day the anthrax letter arrived, could take key positions in an Obama administration.
Despite the spineless response of the Democratic leadership on the entire range of political issues summed up in the label “war on terror,” there are undoubtedly those in the Bush White House who are nervous about allowing the anthrax case to carry over to a new administration in which former targets of the attacks play a significant role.
By Patrick Martin
The Bush administration agreed June 27 to pay nearly $6 million to biological-weapons expert Steven J. Hatfill in return for ending a lawsuit against the Justice Department. Hatfill filed the suit after top government officials named him a “person of interest” in the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks that killed five people and spread panic in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The agreement does not free the scientist of suspicion, although it makes it highly unlikely that he could ever be prosecuted if he actually had any connection to the attacks. The Department of Justice admitted no liability in relation to Hatfill, and a spokesman said that the settlement was agreed “in the best interests of the United States.”
Hatfill was the subject of intense media attention for more than a year, and was fired from a job at Louisiana State University because of FBI pressure. He will receive a lump-sum payment of $2.825 million, as well as an annuity that will pay him another $3 million, or $150,000 a year over the next 20 years.
One consequence of the deal is that the ongoing federal case against former USA Today journalist Toni Locy is likely to be quashed. Locy was subpoenaed by Hatfill’s attorneys, who demanded to know the sources for several articles she had written about the case. Locy refused to comply, citing journalistic confidentiality, but was facing $5,000 per day fines imposed by US District Judge Reggie Walton. The fines were stayed while Locy’s appeal worked its way through the courts.
Hatfill also sued the New York Times and columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote extensively on the case in 2002 and was the first to report Hatfill’s identity, but that case was thrown out by the courts last year.
Judge Walton has been increasingly critical of the government case against Hatfill, declaring at a hearing earlier this year, after he had reviewed still-secret internal FBI memos about the anthrax investigation, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.”
One of Hatfill’s lawyers, Mark Grannis, told the press, “The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who’s been horribly abused can go to a judge and say ‘I need your help,’ and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice.”
Actually, the United States is not such a country. The cash windfall for the former “person of interest” is in sharp contrast to the treatment the Bush administration routinely deals out to terrorism suspects who are not, like Hatfill, veterans of Green Beret training with ultra-right political associations and reported connections to US intelligence services.
If Hatfill had been a Muslim or an immigrant from the Middle East, he would have been arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement, and denied access to a lawyer or to the media. Instead, he walks away with one of the biggest financial awards ever issued for government misconduct.
The US government has not paid a dime in compensation to innocent victims of the CIA’s rendition program, like Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti descent who was kidnapped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia, shipped to Afghanistan, abused for five months, then released when the agency realized it had seized the wrong man. Nor has anything been paid to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, grabbed at Kennedy International Airport while changing planes, transported to Syria and tortured there for months, also eventually released without any charges against him.
Instead of paying them millions of dollars, the Bush administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to bar either victim from suing in US courts over their kidnapping, illegal imprisonment and torture.
Then there is the example of Ali Marri, a Qatari national and US resident, studying at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he lived with his wife and five children. Marri has been held in a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina since 2003 on unspecified terrorism charges. The Bush administration maintains that it has the power to seize an immigrant living legally in the United States, and hold him indefinitely in a military prison without any legal recourse whatsoever.
All three cases have one thing in common: there is far less evidence against any of the prisoners, one still held by the US government, than there was against Hatfill, who was never arrested and has not spent a single day behind bars.
The anthrax investigation is reputedly one of the largest and most wide-ranging ever conducted by the FBI, with thousands of interviews and inquiries, dozens of searches, and zero progress. The dead end is all the more remarkable because independent scientific experts have maintained that the anthrax used in the deadly mailings in the fall of 2001 could only have been obtained by someone with biological warfare expertise and access to US biological weapons testing facilities, particularly the lab at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where Hatfill once worked. The universe of possible suspects has been estimated at between 20 and 250 people.
Hatfill came to the attention of the Justice Department, and ultimately of the media, because of several curious facts in his career. After US military service, he attended the University of Zimbabwe when the country was still under white minority rule, taking a medical degree.
Kristof raised some logical questions in his New York Times column in 2002, where he referred to Hatfill as “Mr. Z.” He wrote (in the form of questions to the government investigators): “Have you examined whether Mr. Z. has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z. has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks? Mr. Z’s resume also claims involvement in the former South African Defense Force; all else aside, who knew that the US Defense Department would pick an American who had served in the armed forces of two white-racist regimes to work in the American biodefense program with some of the world’s deadliest germs?”
While in Zimbabwe, moreover, Hatfill had lived near a Greendale School, the fake return address used in the anthrax mailings to Congress. He had a grievance against the government because the Pentagon had revoked his security clearance on August 23, 2001, and he was later fired from his job at a defense contractor as a result. Investigators also discovered that Hatfill had penned an unpublished novel that centers on a lone terrorist attacking Congress using plague bacteria. These may just be strange coincidences, but they are many.
Even more significant is the evident right-wing political motivation behind the anthrax attacks. They served two purposes: in general, to spread fear and panic after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and in particular, to intimidate the leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress, and sections of media demonized by the far-right as “liberal,” such as NBC News.
The mailings went to the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, as well as to the office of NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, and to the company that owns the National Enquirer tabloid. As the WSWS wrote at the time, after the source of the anthrax was positively identified: “The Democratic Party leadership was targeted for assassination using weapons produced by (or stolen from) the American military itself. The whole affair exudes the stench of an attempted political coup.”
Sections of the ultra-right media, particularly the Wall Street Journal, sought to dismiss the significance of the targeting of congressional Democrats, claiming that the FBI was mistaken in concluding that the attack was of domestic origins and suggesting that Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein were responsible. The Journal continues to take this line today, depicting the payoff to Hatfill as a vindication of its initial criticism.
The Journal makes no mention of another curious fact, uncovered by the right-wing Judicial Watch group, in the course of a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Bush administration: the White House staff were all issued tablets of Cipro, which protects against anthrax, on September 11, 2001—more than three weeks before the first mailings arrived in Florida and on Capitol Hill. Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch declared, in a press statement, “We believe that the White House knew or had reason to know that an anthrax attack was imminent or underway.”
Not only the investigation into the anthrax attacks, but the settlement with Hatfill itself has a politically compromised character. Besides ensuring that the former military bioweapons expert has an incentive to keep silent on whatever he may know about the 2001 events, the payoff may be an effort to dispose of the case before a change of administration in Washington.
Former senator Daschle, one of the main targets of the anthrax mailings, is a leading figure in the Obama campaign, and many of his former staffers, including those who were in the office the day the anthrax letter arrived, could take key positions in an Obama administration.
Despite the spineless response of the Democratic leadership on the entire range of political issues summed up in the label “war on terror,” there are undoubtedly those in the Bush White House who are nervous about allowing the anthrax case to carry over to a new administration in which former targets of the attacks play a significant role.
Job losses mount as US economy heads into virtual freefall
Go to Original
By Jerry White
Meltdown of the US auto industry
By Jerry White
Job losses in the US are mounting as inflation, the credit crunch, plunging home values and tighter family budgets are combining to produce a perfect storm of economic malaise, which is threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of working people.
The private sector eliminated 79,000 jobs from May to June, according to a survey of nearly 400,000 US businesses released Wednesday by Automatic Data Processing, Inc. The ADP National Employment Report said the decline was “broad based across industrial sectors and suggests continued weakness in employment.”
The goods-producing sector slashed 76,000 jobs last month, ADP reported, with manufacturing employment falling by 44,000, marking their nineteenth and twenty-second consecutive monthly declines, respectively. Service jobs also declined by 3,000, the first fall-off since November 2002.
Construction and financial services related to home sales and lending are the two sectors of the economy hardest hit by the housing and mortgage crises. In June, ADP reported, construction employment dropped by an additional 34,000 jobs, marking the nineteenth straight monthly decline. A staggering 349,000 construction jobs have been lost since the peak of August 2006. Three thousand jobs in financial services were also lost in June.
“It’s clear that the housing downturn and credit crunch are still very much under way,” Andrew Tilton, an economist with Goldman Sachs told the New York Times. Clearly, there are more jobs to be lost in housing, finance and construction—hundreds of thousands of more jobs to be lost collectively.”
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its monthly jobs report on Thursday, with economists predicting a loss of as many as 60,000 jobs in June. This would be the sixth consecutive month of employment declines.
Meanwhile, the Chicago-based job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which tracks job cutting announcements by employers, said planned layoffs rose to 81,755 last month, up 47 percent from June 2007.
“Downsizing in the financial sector has remained heavy, but now we’re seeing increased job cuts in other non-housing-related industries, mostly due to the added burden of skyrocketing oil prices,” chief executive officer John A. Challenger said in a statement released Wednesday. “The overall economy could continue to experience net losses for several months to come.’ ’
So far this year, Challenger said, companies have announced 475,948 cuts, up 21 percent from the first six months of 2007.
The financial sector led in announced reductions, with 19,227 job cuts. Last week, Bank of America, the second biggest US bank, announced plans to cut 7,500 jobs after its purchase of home lender Countrywide Financial. Year-to-date, Challenger reported, the financial industry has announced 85,258 positions will be eliminated.
The second highest sector was federal, state and local governments, which are being pressed by falling property values and tax revenues. Government entities have announced 10,797 job cuts, Challenger reported. This was followed by telecommunications, which announced 10,342 cuts.
Last month the official unemployment rate jumped half a point to 5.5 percent, the biggest single month rise in 22 years. Goldman Sachs recently forecast the jobless rate would rise to 6.4 percent by late 2009 before any improvement occurred.
Official government figures routinely underestimate the actual unemployment rate, since they do not count those who have given up looking for work and those reduced to part-time hours. If those workers were added, the “under-employment rate” in the US would rise to 9.7 percent, up from 8.3 percent in May 2007, according to the Labor Department.
“It’s a slow-motion recession,” Ethan Harris, chief US economist for the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers told the New York Times. “In a normal recession, things kind of collapse and get so weak that you have nowhere to go but up. But we’re not getting the classic two or three negative quarters. Instead, we’re expected two years of sub-par growth. Growth that’s not enough to generate jobs. It’s kind of a chronic rather than acute pain.”
The massive loss of jobs in the US is part of an international trend fueled by the worldwide credit crisis, economic slowdown and spiking commodity prices. On Wednesday, the Paris-based Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—which includes 23 European states as well as the US, Australia, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Japan and South Korea—warned that joblessness in industrialized countries would rise by 9 percent to 34.8 million, reversing the downward trend of recent years.
In the face of spreading unemployment, the OECD noted, “the growth in real compensation per employee should slow down in 2008 in the majority of the 30 OECD countries and be broadly in line or below productivity gains.”
From the standpoint of the world’s corporate and financial elite, this is the positive side of the growing economic insecurity felt by masses of working people. Citing the OECD figures on slowing job growth the Financial Times of London noted, “Rising unemployment, however, should dampen fears of inflationary pay rises as workers worry more about retaining their job than using their bargaining power to increase real pay.”
Job cuts, higher prices and crushing levels of debt all threaten to slow US consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the country’s economic activity. In a sign of the impact this is having on retailers, Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee chain, said Tuesday it would close 600 stores in the US—in addition to 100 already announced—laying off more than 12,000 employees.
American Airlines—which, like several other carriers, has cut back routes in the face of the high cost of fuel and fewer air travelers—announced Wednesday it would furlough 900 flight attendants.
UnitedHealth, the largest US health insurer, also announced it would lay off 4,000 workers, due to falling profits and rising health care costs.
The auto industry has been particularly devastated, with vehicle sales hitting a 10-year low, down 18 percent in June. Detroit automakers continued to see sharply declining sales, with Chrysler’s June sales down 36 percent compared to a year ago, Ford down 28 percent and General Motors falling 18 percent. Japanese automaker Toyota was also hit hard, with US sales down 21 percent.
Analysts predict automakers will sell well below 15 million new vehicles in the US this year, far fewer than the 16 million typical sold throughout the decade.
The decline—driven by high gas prices and falling demand, including from contractors and construction workers, for SUVs and pickups, upon whose high profit margins the US automakers depend —has now raised the prospect of the financial failure of one or more of Detroit’s famed “Big Three.”
GM, which is reportedly burning up $1 billion in cash reserves each month, could face bankruptcy, according to Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy, who lowered his outlook for GM stock to $7 a share in a note to investors Wednesday. “The key change in our outlook is a much lower forecast for US auto sales that is driving higher cash burn necessitating a much larger raise than the market is currently anticipating,” Murphy wrote in reference to GM’s need to quickly borrow money.
Other analysts say GM must raise as much as a $10 billion as early as this quarter to keep operating. The company says it has liquidity and flexibility to meet its financial requirements. However, it could find raising additional cash difficult, if not impossible, because of the unfavorable rates in the tight credit market.
The threatened collapse of the once mighty icon of US industrial supremacy underscores the historic decline in the world position of American capitalism and the virtual takeover of the US economy by various forms of financial parasitism. Wall Street has carried out a deliberate policy of deindustrialization, in order to free up capital from unprofitable industries and invest it in more lucrative and speculative ventures, including the dot-com boom, the housing bubble and the new frenzy in oil, corn and other commodity future markets.
GM stock has fallen to a 50-year low, plummeting from $43 last November to close at $9.98 Wednesday. The total value of GM stock is the least of all companies traded on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. By contrast, the Internet company Google is selling at $527 per share and has a market capitalization 28 times the size of GM.
“What’s GM worth now—$7 billion?”, Bruce Birger, managing director of Birger Capital Management asked the Detroit News. “People can write checks for that amount.”
Ford, which has borrowed heavily against its assets, is not much better off, with shares of its stock selling at $4.36, roughly equivalent, the newspaper noted, to the price of gas in some major American cities.
Both companies are reportedly scrambling to sell off assets or use overseas divisions as collateral for new loans, which could mean selling them off to raise cash.
Another candidate for bankruptcy is privately-held Chrysler, which was bought by the private equity firm Cerberus. “They’re a limited liability company—when they run out of money, they’ve run out of money,” Steven Davidoff, a law professor at Wayne State University told the Detroit News. “Cerberus may push for the nuclear option and go into bankruptcy to restructure the organization,” he added, suggesting that the company could follow the lead of auto parts maker Delphi, which used the bankruptcy court to tear up its labor agreements and impose 50 percent wage cuts on its workers.
The News reported that there was “talk” of the automakers reopening union contracts, less than a year after the four-year agreement signed by the United Auto Workers bureaucracy, which handed over massive wage and benefit concessions in return for what have proven to be worthless “job guarantees.” All three of the companies have since carried out mass layoffs.
The burgeoning economic crisis is taking place in the middle of an election campaign that is remarkable for the lack of any serious proposals to meet what is increasingly becoming a catastrophe for tens of millions of working people in the US. The economic stimulus checks Washington sent out to the public have long since been eaten up by rising gas and food prices, and neither party nor their respective presidential candidates—Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain—has any proposal to provide relief to workers facing the loss of their jobs and their homes.
The Exxon Valdez ruling: the Supreme Court once again defends big business
Go to Original
By Ed Hightower
On June 25, the next-to-last day of the current term, the United States Supreme Court slashed the punitive damages judgment for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The award was reduced from $2.5 billion to only $507.5 million—an amount equivalent to a few days’ profit for the giant oil company..
Exxon Mobil Corporation paid more than $1 billion to settle state and federal claims for environmental damages. The company went to trial in 1994, however, against a class action suit by over 32,000 individuals and small businesses devastated by the accident, predominantly commercial fishermen, native Alaskans and local landowners, who claimed that Exxon’s reckless conduct caused the accident.
Exxon conceded fault, and the compensatory damages for the class were set at $507.5 million. The trial then proceeded on the issue of punitive damages only.
The evidence showed that on March 23, 1989, the tanker left port carrying 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Its captain, Joseph Hazlewood, had recently completed an alcohol rehabilitation program. His superiors knew about Hazlewood’s problem, learned that he had relapsed recently, and even drank with him.
Witnesses testified that before leaving port Hazlewood consumed five double-vodka drinks, an amount that would have rendered any non-alcoholic unconscious. When tested by the Coast Guard 11 hours after the accident Hazlewood still had a blood-alcohol level of .061, meaning that during the wreck his level was about three times the legal limit for driving a car.
As the ship approached a well-known reef, Hazlewood set the autopilot, increased speed and turned the ship over to a subordinate unlicensed to perform the maneuver necessary to avoid running aground. The Exxon Valdez hit the reef, spilling crude oil into Prince William Sound. Hazlewood then tried to “rock” the ship free, a procedure that spewed more oil and risked killing the crew.
The result was the largest oil spill in US history: 11 million gallons covering 11,000 square miles, including 1,300 miles of pristine shoreline. The spill devastated the local economy as well as the environment. Estimated losses in the sport fishing industry alone were almost $600 million over the two years following the accident. Within days an estimated 250,000 seabirds perished, along with thousands of otters and seals. Despite billions of dollars in cleanup, the environmental effects of the spill still linger. Much of the oil seeped below the surface of affected beaches, decaying at a rate of about three to four percent per year. Animals that dig in the sand for their food continue to be contaminated.
After hearing this evidence, the jury awarded the 32,000 plaintiffs a total of $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2007 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reduced the amount to $2.5 billion. The Supreme Court decision reduces the award to $507.5 million, effectively fashioning a rule under federal maritime law that limits punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages awarded, a so-called one-to-one ratio.
The punitive award must be viewed in light of Exxon Mobil’s enormous profits. The jury’s original $5 billion award amounts to less than the company’s profits for 1990 alone. In just the final quarter of 2007 Exxon made nearly $12 billion in profits, for an annual total of $40.61 billion. The Supreme Court’s reduced award represents a mere 1.25% of Exxon Mobil’s 2007 profits.
The ruling in Exxon Shipping Company v. Baker is the latest in a series of blatantly pro-business decisions by the Roberts Court, overturning jury verdicts based on established state-law principles. Others just this term include Stoneridge Investment v. Scientific-Atlanta, limiting shareholders’ ability to sue for corporate fraud, and Riegel v. Medtronics, which eliminated the rights of injured patients to sue the manufacturers of faulty medical devices.
The Exxon decision, authored by associate Justice David Souter, a member of the so-called liberal bloc, is the high court’s latest response to the hue and cry of big business over the size of some punitive awards, assessed by local juries to deter and punish corporate wrongdoing. Through a number of decisions, the Supreme Court effectively overruled its 1989 decision in BFI v. Kelco Disposal, where a punitive award 120 times larger than compensatory damages, $6 million to $51,146, was upheld.
In Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company v. Haslip (1991), the court upheld a large punitive damage award, but suggested for the first time that such awards could violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, resurrecting the rationale of early twentieth-century cases that struck down reformist labor laws because they interfered with the “substantive due process” rights of big businesses to make profits.
Next, State Farm Mutual Insurance Co. v. Campbell (2003) fashioned from whole cloth a supposed constitutional rule that in cases with substantial compensatory damages, a ratio of punitive to compensatory damages should not exceed nine-to-one. This rule circumscribed the court’s oft-repeated dictum from previous cases that no “mathematical bright line” could determine the constitutionality of a punitive award.
In Exxon the court has come full circle, at least as regards maritime law cases involving catastrophic damages, by limiting the ratio to one-to-one.
Souter’s opinion admits that big business allegations that punitive damages have “run wild” are untrue. The opinion cites a study of punitive awards showing the median ratio of punitive to compensatory damages to be 0.62:1 and the mean to be only 2.90:1.
Punitive damages are awarded in less than one percent of all civil actions. First, a jury must be sufficiently outraged by the conduct to award them, then the trial judge and appellate court may reduce them. Under such circumstances, punitive damages wind up being assessed in only the most egregious cases.
Dissents by associate justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Bryer agreed that Exxon’s behavior was so repugnant that traditional punitive damages doctrine was preferable. They made much of the fact that the majority decided on the need for the 1:1 ratio after citing the evidence that punitive damages were not in fact out of control.
The essence of this ruling is that it drastically reduces the power of punitive damages to deter the most harmful conduct of big business and makes it much more difficult for plaintiffs’ lawyers to finance costly and protracted litigation like the Exxon Valdez case. The court has taken what was once considered a big club for plaintiffs and their attorneys and whittled it into a toothpick.
By Ed Hightower
On June 25, the next-to-last day of the current term, the United States Supreme Court slashed the punitive damages judgment for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The award was reduced from $2.5 billion to only $507.5 million—an amount equivalent to a few days’ profit for the giant oil company..
Exxon Mobil Corporation paid more than $1 billion to settle state and federal claims for environmental damages. The company went to trial in 1994, however, against a class action suit by over 32,000 individuals and small businesses devastated by the accident, predominantly commercial fishermen, native Alaskans and local landowners, who claimed that Exxon’s reckless conduct caused the accident.
Exxon conceded fault, and the compensatory damages for the class were set at $507.5 million. The trial then proceeded on the issue of punitive damages only.
The evidence showed that on March 23, 1989, the tanker left port carrying 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Its captain, Joseph Hazlewood, had recently completed an alcohol rehabilitation program. His superiors knew about Hazlewood’s problem, learned that he had relapsed recently, and even drank with him.
Witnesses testified that before leaving port Hazlewood consumed five double-vodka drinks, an amount that would have rendered any non-alcoholic unconscious. When tested by the Coast Guard 11 hours after the accident Hazlewood still had a blood-alcohol level of .061, meaning that during the wreck his level was about three times the legal limit for driving a car.
As the ship approached a well-known reef, Hazlewood set the autopilot, increased speed and turned the ship over to a subordinate unlicensed to perform the maneuver necessary to avoid running aground. The Exxon Valdez hit the reef, spilling crude oil into Prince William Sound. Hazlewood then tried to “rock” the ship free, a procedure that spewed more oil and risked killing the crew.
The result was the largest oil spill in US history: 11 million gallons covering 11,000 square miles, including 1,300 miles of pristine shoreline. The spill devastated the local economy as well as the environment. Estimated losses in the sport fishing industry alone were almost $600 million over the two years following the accident. Within days an estimated 250,000 seabirds perished, along with thousands of otters and seals. Despite billions of dollars in cleanup, the environmental effects of the spill still linger. Much of the oil seeped below the surface of affected beaches, decaying at a rate of about three to four percent per year. Animals that dig in the sand for their food continue to be contaminated.
After hearing this evidence, the jury awarded the 32,000 plaintiffs a total of $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2007 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reduced the amount to $2.5 billion. The Supreme Court decision reduces the award to $507.5 million, effectively fashioning a rule under federal maritime law that limits punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages awarded, a so-called one-to-one ratio.
The punitive award must be viewed in light of Exxon Mobil’s enormous profits. The jury’s original $5 billion award amounts to less than the company’s profits for 1990 alone. In just the final quarter of 2007 Exxon made nearly $12 billion in profits, for an annual total of $40.61 billion. The Supreme Court’s reduced award represents a mere 1.25% of Exxon Mobil’s 2007 profits.
The ruling in Exxon Shipping Company v. Baker is the latest in a series of blatantly pro-business decisions by the Roberts Court, overturning jury verdicts based on established state-law principles. Others just this term include Stoneridge Investment v. Scientific-Atlanta, limiting shareholders’ ability to sue for corporate fraud, and Riegel v. Medtronics, which eliminated the rights of injured patients to sue the manufacturers of faulty medical devices.
The Exxon decision, authored by associate Justice David Souter, a member of the so-called liberal bloc, is the high court’s latest response to the hue and cry of big business over the size of some punitive awards, assessed by local juries to deter and punish corporate wrongdoing. Through a number of decisions, the Supreme Court effectively overruled its 1989 decision in BFI v. Kelco Disposal, where a punitive award 120 times larger than compensatory damages, $6 million to $51,146, was upheld.
In Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company v. Haslip (1991), the court upheld a large punitive damage award, but suggested for the first time that such awards could violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, resurrecting the rationale of early twentieth-century cases that struck down reformist labor laws because they interfered with the “substantive due process” rights of big businesses to make profits.
Next, State Farm Mutual Insurance Co. v. Campbell (2003) fashioned from whole cloth a supposed constitutional rule that in cases with substantial compensatory damages, a ratio of punitive to compensatory damages should not exceed nine-to-one. This rule circumscribed the court’s oft-repeated dictum from previous cases that no “mathematical bright line” could determine the constitutionality of a punitive award.
In Exxon the court has come full circle, at least as regards maritime law cases involving catastrophic damages, by limiting the ratio to one-to-one.
Souter’s opinion admits that big business allegations that punitive damages have “run wild” are untrue. The opinion cites a study of punitive awards showing the median ratio of punitive to compensatory damages to be 0.62:1 and the mean to be only 2.90:1.
Punitive damages are awarded in less than one percent of all civil actions. First, a jury must be sufficiently outraged by the conduct to award them, then the trial judge and appellate court may reduce them. Under such circumstances, punitive damages wind up being assessed in only the most egregious cases.
Dissents by associate justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Bryer agreed that Exxon’s behavior was so repugnant that traditional punitive damages doctrine was preferable. They made much of the fact that the majority decided on the need for the 1:1 ratio after citing the evidence that punitive damages were not in fact out of control.
The essence of this ruling is that it drastically reduces the power of punitive damages to deter the most harmful conduct of big business and makes it much more difficult for plaintiffs’ lawyers to finance costly and protracted litigation like the Exxon Valdez case. The court has taken what was once considered a big club for plaintiffs and their attorneys and whittled it into a toothpick.
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