Bush regime
November 1st
posted: November 1, 2007 3:58 EST
Senate Dems caught in a water hazard over torture
By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
Driving home from a weekend in the mountains on Sunday, listening to news radio, my wife suddenly asked what the term “waterboarding” means.
I explained the gruesome details, which sounded familiar to her as a Chilean who fled the Pinochet dictatorship.
“Oh, you mean torture,” she said. “Why do they make it sound like some sort of new sport?” At which point I suggested she seek nomination as attorney general of the United States.
Her response to the image of someone being tied to a plank and dunked backward into a tub of water seemed a helluva lot more reasonable and authentic than that of Michael Mukasey, the current nominee chosen by the White House to replace Alberto Gonzales. During two days of questioning last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mukasey was getting along just swimmingly until he got swept away by a simple, straightforward question: Did he or did he not consider waterboarding to be torture?
Mukasey circularly paddled around the query and finally wound up saying: “I don’t know what’s involved in waterboarding.”
My wife has an excuse. She’s a Spanish teacher whose native language isn’t English. But what’s Mukasey’s story? He’s a retired federal judge and former prosecutor from New York handpicked to replace the very man who gained infamy, in part, by authorizing torture techniques. Does Mukasey need a little memory refresher? Would committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) have gotten a more forthright answer if, instead of pursuing his polite questioning, he had pushed aside Larry Craig and held down Mukasey’s head in a nearby Senate toilet bowl for 30 seconds?
“If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional,” Mukasey said. But he refused to say that waterboarding was torture. Then it got worse. When asked by Democrats whether a U.S. president can blithely bypass a statute, if he can put himself above the law as George W. Bush did in authorizing his warrantless-surveillance program, all of a sudden Mukasey regained his legal memory and, essentially, said “Yes.” His affirmative answer was appropriately cloaked in legalese mumbo jumbo, but his endorsement of extralegal powers by an American president was unequivocal.
Kudos, then, to Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, whose third-tier, nothing-to-lose presidential campaign has let him sprout a formidable pair of cojones . Earlier this week, Dodd said he had already made up his mind to vote no on Mukasey’s confirmation.
“That is about as basic as it gets. You must obey the law. Everyone must,” Dodd said, referring to Mukasey’s odd and chilling legal theory that the president of the United States is somehow not bound to respect the rule of law.
read on . . .
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:53 EST
Oh yeah? How Mukasey and Kerik are haunting Rudy's run.
By Wayne Barrett, Village Voice
The Democrats who questioned attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey at his recent Senate confirmation hearing outdid one another in a frustrating effort to get the former judge to assert his independence from the Bush White House. With his predecessor, Bush pal Alberto Gonzales, finally forced from office, the senators were hoping for a nominee with fewer complicating relationships.
Fat chance. The question for Mukasey is not what he'll do at Justice for the soon-to-be- departing Republican president, but what he'll do for the putative next one, his lifelong friend Rudy Giuliani. Mukasey and Giuliani were young federal prosecutors together in the early 1970s and then practiced at the same Manhattan law firm, Patterson Belknap, where Mukasey returned in 2006 when he retired after 18 years on the federal bench in New York. Giuliani chose Mukasey to swear him in at his inaugurals in 1994 and 1998.
The question of Mukasey's strong ties to Giuliani got the light touch from Senator Pat Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman who opened the two-day proceeding by saying that he assumed Mukasey would "totally recuse" himself from "any involvement with Mr. Giuliani or any other candidate for president." Mukasey laughed at the question, as if the answer was obvious, and quickly agreed. But that chuckle rings a little hollow when you look at who had come with him to the hearing: his wife Susan, who volunteered almost daily in the Giuliani mayoral campaigns; his stepson Marc, who was a staff assistant in one campaign and currently is a partner at the Texas-based law firm that Giuliani recently joined, Bracewell & Giuliani; and Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who recently endorsed Giuliani and worked closely with him as a federal prosecutor. Marc Mukasey is currently representing Giuliani Partners in the federal probe of Bernard Kerik, a onetime member of the consulting firm. Freeh's appearance, sitting beside the family, was a stark indication of just how unconsciously political Mukasey's key relationships are. (For Democrats on the committee, the sight of Freeh, who led multiple probes of both Clintons, might have been an indication of Mukasey's partisanship. In Freeh's recent autobiography, he concluded that "the presidency hit an all-time low" under Bill Clinton—who named him to head the FBI, only to wind up as the target of multiple Freeh probes—adding that if he were Clinton, "I might never show my face in public again.")
Mukasey has so far indicated that he will recuse himself in the ongoing probe of Kerik, the ex–police commissioner and onetime Giuliani-backed nominee for homeland security secretary, who has already pleaded guilty in a state case and is facing a mountain of federal charges. But Mukasey's recusal shouldn't really be a problem. The Justice Department agreed months ago to extend the statute of limitations on the case against Kerik to November 17, when his expected indictment may suddenly emerge as a national story haunting the Giuliani campaign. The case is so layered in conflict that Alberto Gonzales is a likely witness. It was Gonzales who vetted Kerik for the homeland-security post in 2004 and was swamped by false claims about him emanating from the fax machines and computers at Giuliani Partners' Times Square headquarters. The Washington Post reported in April that Kerik was "likely" to be indicted for "bald-faced lies" during the White House clearance process, including possible misstatements on forms filled out with the assistance of Giuliani's firm.
read on . . .
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October 29th
posted: October 29, 2007 8:15 EST
Día de los Muertos? We'll give you a Day of the Dead. Our congressional delegation tops this year’s list of 33 villains.
By OC Weekly
The death the Iraq war has wrought belongs to us all. It’s all our fault, thanks to our oh-so-scary elected Congressional representatives.
In this space, we’ll review just how our current and former congresspeople helped get us into this mess—or, at best, didn’t keep us out of it. Also in this year’s rogues’ gallery are a few local cheerleaders and enablers of the war effort.
Non-Iraq-related evildoers don’t get a free pass, though. We also offer a list of other assorted bad actors—Nazis, rapists and lawyers, oh, my!
Now, Orange County being Orange County, we have more than our share of loyal Republican legislators who, whatever their strengths and weaknesses on other issues, have wholeheartedly supported this country’s greatest moral, legal and strategic foreign-?policy failure since Vietnam.
Our lone Democratic rep, to her credit, did vote against the original authorization for war in Iraq (which was signed into law five years to the day before this writing—weird), but has since consistently voted to fund a debacle that has now devolved into what liberal Middle East expert Juan Cole counts as three distinct civil wars. More broadly, she and our senators are part of an ineffectual opposition that, whether in the minority or the majority, has not provided any meaningful check to the Bush administration’s war plans.
And where have those plans led us? To the abyss. It’s beyond scary to contemplate the depth of the pit of immorality that is the Iraq War, so most people don’t even look at it. Phrases like “Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” “The next six months will be crucial,” “The surge is working,” even “Bring them home now” are defense mechanisms. They’re about the idea of the abyss, not the abyss itself.
Just stare at it for a while, and as Nietzsche predicted, this one will stare back. I don’t know what anybody else sees, but when I look at it, I see something that looks a lot like the grinning calavera Los Angeles artist Votan drew for this week’s cover. Its empty gaze is an accusation. How do you plead?
So head down to your neighborhood botánica and buy a couple of candles, a sugar skull or two, a bouquet of orange marigolds. Set up a little ofrenda at home. Pour a shot of your favorite tequila, place it on the altar, then drink one yourself and say a little prayer against what should be your greatest fear: that politicians of such little wisdom as those who had a hand in the Iraq War will still be representing this county—and this country—when the next generation of soldiers turns 18. — Ted B. Kissell
Click here for the list.
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posted: October 29, 2007 1:46 EST
Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.
He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.
Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.
More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:
A guerrilla war that has dealt serious defeats to predatory lenders has spread from states like North Carolina and Massachusetts to big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, which recently passed ordinances aimed at ending unfair banking practices. So why hasn't the fight against what some have called "financial apartheid" spread to the biggest city of all?
State regulators in Albany adopted new restrictions on finance companies late last year, but activists say the victims of those profiteers still lack meaningful protection—help that could come from city officials. In New York, Mayor Giuliani has taken no action against predatory lending, say community organizers, and the City Council has done practically nothing.
But the big banks are worried about Giuliani's potential successors. Citigroup has already laid big cash on the campaign coffers of prominent Democrats. …
Public Advocate Mark Green can say he probably was the first of the four Democratic mayoral candidates to make a big splash about the serious problem of blacks, Latinos, and the elderly being targeted by abusive lending practices. But neither he nor the other three Democrats have taken strong action to protect the poor from signing their lives away in unfairly structured loans.
Green saw it coming back in 1993, when his Consumer Affairs Office released a report pointing out a growing number of predatory loans in the city. Since then, Wall Street has financed a huge surge in the so-called subprime market, and more people than ever are being seduced into high-cost refinancing plans and shady home-improvement loans that are sending them toward bankruptcy. … Green isn't eager to enact new regulations.
In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.
In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.
O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.
As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:
E. Stanley O’Neal could walk away with $251.4 million if a merger sets off a change-in-control payout.
Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.
Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.
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October 22nd
posted: October 22, 2007 6:33 EST
El Nuevo Herald’s Gonzalo Guillén is the latest victim of Bush buddy Álvaro Uribe.
By Chuck Strouse, Miami New Times
Gonzalo Guillén is on the lam. His wife and son are in hiding.
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe publicly belittled the reporter. Strangers repeatedly threatened to murder him. His bodyguard disappeared.
"I got a call at my home ... a guy said, 'We can kill you,'" Guillén recalls from Lima, Peru, where he's been laying low for five days. "Then the threats started coming fast. Five calls at my home, e-mails, 24 death threats in 48 hours. I was afraid for me, for my family. I left the country in a sprint."
Sound like a spy thriller?
It ain't.
Guillén has for seven years been a reporter for Miami's El Nuevo Herald, one of America's top Spanish-language publications. He's one of two Colombian journalists whom President Uribe has dumped on in the past two weeks. Daniel Coronell, a columnist for the well-known magazine Semana, also went abroad after the president publicly called him "a coward, a liar, a swine, and a professional slanderer." In this South American country, where vigilante justice rules, insults can mean bloodshed.
"Outrageous," comments Joel Simon of New York's Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "President Uribe knows that to say this kind of thing opens the doors for [thugs] to potentially kill."
Venezuela and Cuba got most of the ink and opprobrium at last weekend's meeting of Latin American journalists in Miami. News of Hugo Chávez's closing an opposition TV station in Caracas, as well as restrictions on reporters and jailing of critics in Havana, was lapped up like milk by a gatito.
But it's even more difficult to report the truth in Colombia, which will receive $756 million in U.S. foreign aid this year. At least 39 journalists have been whacked for doing their jobs there in the past 15 years. These days, many reporters avoid criticizing the government. Why risk being murdered? More than 3,000 cases of self-censorship were recently documented in the country.
read on . . .
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posted: October 22, 2007 1:48 EST
Exclusive: Brooklyn businessman/arsonist endangered NY firefighters, but AG nominee Mukasey offered to tout the felonious goniff's "remarkable character" before sentencing
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
In a previously unreported episode, U.S. Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey praised the "remarkable character" of notorious Brooklyn businessman Nat Schlesinger after Schlesinger was convicted of arson in a blaze that nearly killed a New York City firefighter.
After having stood up as a federal judge for a convicted arsonist who reaped millions of dollars from his crimes, Mukasey is on tap to become the country's top law-enforcement official. His hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee has contained no mention of the Schlesinger case.
This isn't part of Mukasey's dim past; it happened last year. And Mukasey wasn't the only prominent person to stand up for Schlesinger. Israel's current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, used his government stationery (when he was merely a deputy prime minister) to plead on behalf of the powerful Brooklyn businessman, as my colleague Tom Robbins reported on August 1, 2006.
Mukasey was prohibited from directly volunteering a written testimonial because he was a sitting federal judge on New York's Southern District bench. But he scooted around that technicality, and Schlesinger's lawyers bandied about his name — and what he would say about the arsonist — in their June 30, 2006, presentencing memo, which Robbins obtained.
The arsonist's lawyers made no bones about it, salting their memo to federal Judge Arthur Spatt of New York's Eastern District with Mukasey's name. They titled a section of the memo with this:
Judge Mukasey Indicated that He Would Provide Information Regarding Nat Schlesinger’s Remarkable Character if this Court Makes an Inquiry of Him
And Schlesinger's lawyers wrote:
At the outset, we were advised that Judge Michael B. Mukasey knows the Schlesinger family and attended weddings of the Defendant’s children. Based on his history and knowledge of Mr. Schlesinger, it is our understanding that Judge Mukasey is willing to provide information to this Court that may prove extremely helpful at sentencing.
However, we are also aware of the constraints imposed in the Commentary to Canon 2B of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which provides that a "judge should not initiate the communication of information to a sentencing judge … but may provide to such persons information in response to a formal request." … As a consequence, we ask the Court to make a formal request of Judge Mukasey for any information that may prove relevant to Nat Schlesinger’s sentencing.
There's no evidence that Spatt made such a request, which would have been highly unusual, to say the least. But the memo had practically the same effect because it clued in Judge Spatt that one of his colleagues vouched for Schlesinger.
Robbins noted at the time that Schlesinger was convicted in 2005 on "charges of arson, mail fraud, and — a particularly tough count under federal law — using fire to commit a felony."
The case was broken by fire marshal Bernard "Buddy" Santangelo, sparking a lengthy investigation of suspicious fires and a successful prosecution under U.S. Attorney Roslyn Mauskopf. Judge Spatt was swamped with glowing testimonials from Schlesinger's fellow Jews, many of them Orthodox, as is Mukasey.
Mukasey's own status as an Orthodox Jew has been an issue before — and in Jewish publications, as I pointed out this past September 24 in an item about his presiding over a terrorism trial at which he clashed with William Kunstler over whether Mukasey would be able to fairly judge Muslim defendants.
In the Schlesinger episode, the arsonist didn't exactly have a clean track record. As Robbins wrote last year:
It wasn't his first time before a federal judge. Back in 1978, Schlesinger was sentenced to 18 months in prison for conspiring to bribe a polygraph examiner to submit a fake report on behalf of a diamond smuggler.
Schlesinger faced up to 22 years in prison in the arson case, but it wasn't only his fellow Orthodox Jews who played the religion card. Schlesinger himself played it. Robbins wrote:
Standing before Judge Spatt …, Schlesinger made an audacious claim about his circumstances. "I am here because I am a Jew," he said. The statement, according to Newsday’s Robert Kessler, who was in the courtroom, brought a quick and strong response from assistant U.S. attorney Lawrence Ferazani, who tried the case against Schlesinger along with prosecutors Cynthia Monaco and Richard Lunger. Ferazani said he was representing Mauskopf, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. As for Schlesinger, the prosecutor said: "The reason he is here is because he is a thief, because he is an arsonist, and because he is a money launderer."
That apparently didn't faze Olmert. In a letter dated September 11, 2005, Olmert (at the time Israel's vice prime minister of industry, trade, and labor) pleaded with Judge Spatt to show Schlesinger "mercy, compassion, and understanding." (Again, see Robbins's "Burn Job," August 1, 2006.)
The only hot air that counted, however, was what a New York City firefighter endured because of Schlesinger's felonious behavior. As Robbins wrote:
Schlesinger, who has long been a major figure in Williamsburg and upstate Monsey, where he owns property, was found guilty of having set a fire that took place on December 31, 1998. The New Year's Eve blaze occurred at a huge, block-long industrial building the businessman owned at Wallabout Street and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, where he manufactured women's clothing for such high-end stores as Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale's. The inferno almost felled a firefighter who became lost in thick smoke on the building's third floor, where the fire had been set in a maze of boxes. The firefighter had to send a "Mayday" message before he was rescued, unharmed.
In the end, Schlesinger was sentenced 15 years in prison. Schlesinger's lawyers have appealed. An e-mail to Mukasey at his law firm elicited no reply.
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October 17th
posted: October 17, 2007 11:10 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.
Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.
That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.
In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.
This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."
Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:
"We solemnly demand that the U.S. cancel the extremely wrong arrangements," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told reporters before the meeting. "It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China's internal affairs."
Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.
Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."
It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."
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October 16th
posted: October 16, 2007 10:56 EST
Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.
Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.
Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.
Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.
Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.
Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.
We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.
We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.
There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.
Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.
Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.
Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.
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October 8th
posted: October 8, 2007 1:10 EST
Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.
As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,
With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.
The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers and middle managers crossing the border.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.
Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:
The embassy, which will be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, was budgeted at $592 million. The core project was supposed to have been completed by last month, but the timetable has slipped so much that the State Department has sought and received permission from the Iraqi government to allow about 2,000 non-Iraqi construction employees to stay in the country until March.
As I wrote on August 8:
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:
Because of allegations of labour trafficking and other abuses, First Kuwaiti is also being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, an action precipitated by U.S. citizens claiming that company workers loaded onto planes in Kuwait were handed boarding passes for Dubai before flying directly to Baghdad. The passengers were mostly low-wage Asian migrant labourers earning as little as 250 dollars a month.
Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:
The agreement also lays out salary: 346 dollars a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus 104 dollars a month for mandatory two hours overtime every day.
Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."
The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:
"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on today."
The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into a breach left when Congress did not pass an immigration overhaul in June that might have helped American farms.
These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:
The administration has pursued the project discreetly. The issue of immigration has generated friction between President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.
Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.
Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.
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October 4th
posted: October 4, 2007 1:41 EST
The media’s coverage of a college newspaper’s profane two-word editorial deserves more than a few curse words.
By Michael Roberts, Westword (Denver)
"I think it's been really disheartening," says J. David McSwane about press coverage that's swirled around the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the Colorado State University-based student newspaper he edits, since an opinion banner reading "FUCK BUSH" was printed in its September 21 edition. "As a journalist, I'm extremely frustrated."
He should be. On September 25, for example, Channel 4's late newscast led off with anchor Jim Benemann stating, "The editor at the student newspaper up at CSU says he will sue if he's fired." As McSwane, who recently turned twenty, pointed out in an item he affixed to the Collegian's website, he did no such thing, since he hadn't been interviewed for the piece. Indeed, the person doing the talking was McSwane's attorney David Lane, who enjoys delivering provocative declarations; in this situation, he proclaimed, "If I can make a case that the government is putting a gag in David McSwane's mouth, they're going to federal court."
Nonetheless, Channel 4 news director Tim Wieland isn't troubled that Benemann's intro cited McSwane rather than his counsel, saying, "I'm comfortable with that" — and neither does he think the station blundered by failing to mention in this report and numerous others that McSwane helped the CBS affiliate win a prestigious Peabody Award in April 2006 and worked at the outlet as a paid investigative producer (not just an intern). Full disclosure is typically deemed a journalistic necessity, yet Wieland maintains that staffers initially felt McSwane's previous association with the outlet wasn't "germane" to the Collegian brouhaha, and only decided that it might provide "context" in some instances after skipping over it during three full days of reporting.
Westword has a McSwane connection as well. In September 2005, the paper ran his feature "An Army of Anyone," which built upon the investigation that earned Channel 4 its Peabody: As a student journalist at Arvada West High School, McSwane posed as a pot-smoking dropout interested in joining the Army in order to document the dubious lengths to which recruiters were willing to go to get him into uniform. He was awarded with an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) prize for his high-school efforts and the Westword offering, which ran alongside a companion article written by yours truly that focused on recruiting in the wake of the scandal McSwane stirred. I also guested alongside McSwane on a KHOW talk-show segment hosted by Peter Boyles.
Is any of that germane? Damn right it is — because it gives news consumers the maximum amount of information, rather than treating them like children incapable of putting details into perspective. Then again, McSwane understands why Channel 4 took the tack it did. "Of course they're distancing themselves from me," he says. "If I was them, I'd distance myself from something like this, too."
McSwane and many of his Collegian colleagues set out to cause a commotion, albeit not as large a one as developed: "I didn't think it would go national," he admits. Too bad their concept was so clumsy. They were incensed about a September 17 incident in Florida in which disruptive college student Andrew Meyer was forcibly prevented from quizzing Massachusetts Senator John Kerry; a video of Meyer's "Don't tase me, bro!" plea to security officers quickly became a YouTube sensation. But after penning the ardent defense of free speech that appeared on the September 21 Collegian cover, they felt they should underline their point by exercising this right in the boldest way possible. Hence, the "FUCK BUSH" line, which McSwane says was intended as a "wake-up call" to students who passively accept the status quo instead of voicing their views, as college enrollees have in decades past.
Predictably, the decision to target George W. Bush, who was only peripherally related to the Florida dust-up (Meyer wanted to know if Kerry and the president had been in Yale's Skull and Bones society), transformed the editorial into a culture-war blast of the sort that sucks up far too much of the media's attention these days. "Fuck Bush" bumperstickers have been around for years, and the profane part of the expression is extraordinarily commonplace in settings like college campuses. But that didn't stop CSU student Republicans such as student Chelsey Penoyer from taking advantage of this golden opportunity for attention-getting by organizing protests against McSwane and hitting the media circuit.
read on . . .
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