The Rag Blog

If you can’t give me your word of honor, will you give me your promise? – Samuel Goldwyn, The Great Goldwyn

The man can’t keep his word even though the words are always the same. Having mouthed them so often you’d think he could remember them. What’s surprising now is that the forgotten beneficiaries of his words are the people he sent to Iraq to get killed or wounded who now wish to be remembered by the man who sent them there to gratify his own ego. They shouldn’t be surprised. They should have learned from Katrina.

Mr. Bush visited New Orleans shortly after Katrina had paid its respects. Standing in the Rose Garden on September 3 of that sad year, Mr. Bush said: “I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering. . . The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need. And the federal government will do its part . . . . We have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters all along the Gulf Coast and we will not rest until we get this right and the job is done.” Mr. Bush is well rested. Anyone reading about New Orleans knows he didn’t get it right and the job isn’t done. Those living in New Orleans suffered because of nature’s tragedy and were forgotten by the man who promised them help. Now it’s the veterans’ turn.

In his recent State of the Union message, Mr. Bush received great applause when he said: “Our military families also sacrifice for America. . . . We have a responsibility to provide for them. So I ask you to join me in expanding their access to child care. . . and allowing our troops to transfer their unused education benefits to their spouses or children. Our military families serve our nation, they inspire our nation, and tonight our nation honors them.” One week later he submitted his 2009 budget and dissed the veterans. No funds were included for transferring education benefits.

In submitting his $1.3 trillion budget he forgot to include the benefit that would cost between $1 and $2 billion dollars. That was not the end of ignoring the needs of veterans. According to a release from the Brain Injury Association of America in a press release commenting on the budget, for the third year in a row, Mr. Bush has proposed the complete elimination of the Federal traumatic Brain Injury Program. The program “provides grants to state agencies and [other organizations] to improve access to health and other services for individuals with traumatic brain injury and their families.” Susan Connors, president and CEO of the Brain Injury Association of America described the omission as “deeply disappointing” and went on to say that “President Bush just doesn’t get it.” Those two examples are not the only ones in which veterans who have withstood the onslaught from the enemy in Iraq have to defend themselves from the onslaught of the wolf in the White House parading in sheep’s clothing.

According to a report on National Public Radio, during a visit by representatives of the Army Surgeon General’s staff at Fort Drum Army base, officials from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs were told they should stop helping injured soldiers complete paperwork related to their injuries. The forms completed forms determine what level of care and disability benefits the soldiers receive.

Rep. John McHugh who represents the area that includes Ft. Drum, the military base at which the instructions were given, responded that: “The Surgeon General of the Army told me very flatly that it was not the Army that told the VA to stop this help.” That would have been the end of the matter but for one thing. A summary of the meeting prepared by one of the attendees surfaced and it contradicted the Surgeon General who had contradicted NPR.

Kevin Esslinger, a legal administration specialist at Ft. Drum , prepared the memorandum. It says that Col. Becky Baker of the office of the Surgeon General said the “Veterans Benefits Administration should discontinue counseling Medical Evaluation Board (MED) soldiers on the appropriateness of the Department of Defense MEB/OEB (Physical evaluation board) ratings and findings. There exists a conflict of interest.” Responding to that comment Mr. Esslinger wrote in his summary that “a recent Department of the Army Inspector General inspection had noted the practice and had found it to be a useful service to the soldier.” He went on to say the practice would be discontinued.

NPR’s requests for interviews with Col. Baker and Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker were turned down. It is hard to understand why. But here is something that is not hard to understand-why Mr. Bush’s 2009 budget proposed a reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from $400 million to $200 million.

Long notorious for its checkered history of voter suppression, Waller County, Texas’s degree of racial division approaches the level of myth.

In Waller County, for example, a person calling a funeral parlor is asked: what color is the body? There are black and white funeral homes, says Christina Sanders, who directs the Black Youth Vote! effort in Texas, and the two don’t ever mix.

With the Texas primary approaching, tensions flared again this month over one of the county’s sorest racial issues–the color of the vote.

For decades, Waller County has repressed the vote of the local historically black college, Prairie View A&M. In 1979, the Supreme Court stepped in to intercede, upholding A&M students’ right to vote where they declare residency. Yet since then, the county has gone so far as to indict A&M students that vote, and in the 2004 case of one attorney general, even threaten such students with jail and $10,000 in fines.

But this election cycle, when the county eliminated the temporary early voting location adjacent to A&M, students rebelled. The county’s only other early voting site was over 7 miles away from campus in the town of Hempstead–with no bus route connecting the two. And at a time when youth turnout is at record highs, says Sanders, A&M students were outraged. “This being a historically black university, and a presidential election when we’re hearing things that we can relate to–I just [couldn’t] believe it,” Sanders said.

On Jan. 25, the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights sent a letter to the Department of Justice calling the move “motivated, at least in part, by a discriminatory purpose.”

Students won their victory this week when, under pressure from the Department of Justice, election commissioners convened an emergency meeting to re-establish A&M’s early polling site.

When on Jan. 22 a federal court judge sentenced Jose Padilla to 17 years in prison for conspiracy to commit terrorism, it was a one-day story. But, in fact, the Padilla case goes on.

Padilla, a U.S. citizen and former Chicago gang member, alleges that he was tortured during the more than three and a half years he spent behind bars at a Navy brig in South Carolina. He is now suing John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who reportedly devised the legal theories to justify the interrogation techniques used against him.

While Padilla’s suit raises a number of constitutional claims—including that the military violated his rights to counsel and to exercise his Muslim religion—the heart of his argument is that Yoo gave legal advice to justify his torture, in violation of due process of law as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Padilla, who is separately appealing his recent conviction, asks the court to rule that his treatment violated the Constitution, and to order Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, to pay him $1 in damages.

The suit raises important questions of law and fact. Are lawyers liable for giving bad legal advice to federal officials?

In August 2002, Yoo, then an attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a formal opinion letter advising that interrogation techniques are not torture unless they inflict pain equivalent to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” The new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, later withdrew Yoo’s opinion.

Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, explains in his book, The Terror Presidency, that Yoo’s reasoning was “legally flawed” and “tendentious.” It seemed “more an exercise of sheer power than reasoned analysis.” Even so, was it the proximate cause of any mistreatment of Padilla?

However such questions are resolved, Padilla’s allegations of his treatment, if true, ought to shame a civilized society.

‘Measurably abnormal’

Padilla charges he was imprisoned in a seven-foot by nine-foot cell in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., for nearly four years. For the first 21 months, he says he was denied all contact with anyone outside the brig, including family and lawyers, leaving him with interrogators and guards as his only human contact.

He alleges he was allowed no watch or clock, nor any news about the outside world. The only window in his cell was blacked out. When he was allowed out of his cell, his eyes and ears were covered.

Periodically, he says, he was subjected to absolute light or darkness for periods in excess of 24 hours. He was subjected to extreme temperature variations in his cell, where his bed consisted of a cold steel slab with no mattress, pillow or blanket. He says brig guards and others deliberately banged on his walls and bars at all hours of the night. For hours at a time, he says guards kept him shackled and manacled, or forced him to sit or stand in uncomfortable and painful positions.

Worse, his interrogators allegedly threatened to cut him with a knife and pour alcohol in the wounds. He says they also threatened to kill him, or send him to a country where they said he would receive far worse treatment. Against his will, they allegedly administered chemicals, which Padilla believes were psychotropic drugs.

When his lawyers were finally allowed access to him, he was not permitted to tell them about prison conditions.

If Padilla’s allegations are true, they qualify as torture under international law: the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain for purposes such as interrogation. The U.N. Committee on Torture and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have held that incommunicado detention—even for periods far shorter than Padilla endured—is torture. They have also ruled that combinations of sensory deprivation techniques amount to torture, as well.

According to Padilla’s complaint, a “substantial body of clinical literature and expert opinion … holds that restriction of environmental and social stimulation has a profoundly deleterious effect on mental functioning, and that even a few days of solitary confinement predictably causes brain patterns to become measurably abnormal.”

It would drive anyone mad.

Waging ‘lawfare’

Yoo has castigated Padilla and his lawyers at the Yale Law School clinic for waging “lawfare,” which Yoo calls “another dimension” of the terrorist war against the United States.

In a Jan. 16 op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Yoo complained that terrorists use cases like Padilla’s to press “novel theories that have failed at the ballot box.”

If their legal theories are novel, Yoo can thank himself: Never before has the Justice Department sanctioned prolonged, mind-altering brutality on a U.S. citizen.

Still, suing a government lawyer for rendering legal advice, no matter how injudicious, ought to give pause. Such lawsuits could deter creative thinking by attorneys trying to protect the public. If allowed at all, they should be confined to rare and extreme cases, such as Yoo’s torture memo.

There are limits on what advice lawyers may give. After World War II, German government lawyers who wrote memos and orders depriving Russian prisoners of war of their Geneva Conventions protections, and authorizing the forced disappearances of political prisoners, were convicted at Nuremberg. Would authorizing torture of prisoners have made them any less guilty?

Although the suit against Yoo does not seek to convict him of a crime, it does aim to hold him civilly liable—for a symbolic $1 in damages—not only for the torture, but also for his legal advice that allegedly led to violations of Padilla’s constitutional rights. Those include the rights to counsel, access to court, due process of law, freedom of religion, rights to information and association, and his rights to be free from inhumane conditions of confinement, cruel and unusual punishment, coercive interrogations and improper military detention.

In pressing these wide-ranging claims, Padilla’s lawyers face daunting legal obstacles. Unlike most damages suits for violations of basic rights, civil rights law does not authorize their lawsuit. By necessity, Padilla’s suit rests directly on the Constitution. While the Supreme Court has authorized suits for damages based solely on violations of the Constitution, it does so sparingly—when the violations would not otherwise be subject to judicial or effective oversight and, even then, only if no special factors weigh against the wisdom of creating a new cause of action.

Only one of Padilla’s claims—under the Eighth Amendment—has arguable Supreme Court precedent. Some claims may fail on the ground that they are subject to judicial oversight in the criminal proceedings against him. Others may be rejected because they deal with gray areas of national security law, where legal mistakes should not result in damages suits.

But Padilla should probably be allowed to try at least his core claims—that the torturous confinement and interrogation techniques violated his Fifth Amendment right to due process, and possibly his Eighth Amendment right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. To the extent the prosecution in his criminal trial did not rely on any coerced confession by Padilla, these alleged violations have not been subject to judicial oversight.

Curbing an imperial presidency

If Padilla overcomes this hurdle, others remain. Yoo may contend that he is entitled to absolute immunity, as are prosecutors when presenting their cases to a court. But Yoo more likely will be granted only the “qualified immunity” afforded to prosecutors when they advise police on interrogation techniques, or to the attorney general when he authorizes national security wiretaps without a judicial warrant.

If Yoo is granted qualified immunity, he can be held liable for his erroneous legal advice only if it violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” In this case, his legal advice plainly did: Yoo’s memo legally authorized torture.

But the issue is not so simple.

Yoo’s overriding legal rationale is that the president’s powers give him constitutional license to override any law—including laws against torture—if he deems it necessary to wage a war. The courts may thus need to consider whether any reasonable lawyer could advise that the Constitution allows the president to disregard all law during wartime.

Finally, the government might decide to assert the “state secrets” privilege to quash Padilla’s claims, on the ground that the claims cannot fairly be adjudicated without probing secret intelligence methods and communications.

Unless barred by the state secrets privilege, Padilla’s suit will likely break new ground. Far from a case of “lawfare,” it promises to strengthen the rule of law by clarifying whether and when government lawyers can be held accountable for ill-considered legal advice.

Behind all the blather and bullshit about the Federal Reserve’s rescue gambits and the machinations of the ratings agencies, and the wiles of foreign sovereign wealth, and the incomprehensible mysteries of markets, and the various weather forecasts of a gathering “recession” is the simple fact that the USA is a way poorer nation than we imagined ourselves to be six months ago. The American economy has been running on the fumes of “creatively engineered” finance (i.e. new-and-improved swindling) for years, and now these swindles are unraveling. In their aftermath, they leave empty wallets, drained bank accounts, plundered retirements funds, boiled away capital reserves, worthless stocks, bankrupt companies, vandalized housing tracts, ruined families, and Wall Street executives who are still pulling down multimillion-dollar pay packages despite running their companies into the ground.

We’re burning down the house and kidding ourselves that there is a remedy for it. All the rate cuts and loans to big banks and bank-like corporate organisms, and “monoline” bond insurers, and mortgage mills amount to little more than a final desperate shell game to conceal the radioactive pea of aggregate loss. The losses are everywhere, and when you add up seven billion here and eleven billion there they probably amount to something like a trillion dollars in sheer capital evaporation — not counting the abstract “positions” that the capital was leveraged onto by the playerz and boyz who mistook algorithms for productive activity.

The shell game may run a few more weeks but personally I believe the timbers are burning. The losses are no longer “contained” or concealable. A consensus has now formed that we’re in for a “recession.” The idea is that, yes, this seems to be the low arc of the business cycle. Fewer Hamptons villas will be redecorated in the interim. We’ll gird our loins and get through the bad weather and when the sun shines again, we’ll be ready with new algorithms for new sport-with-capital.

Uh-uh. Think again. This is not so much financial bad weather as financial climate change. Something is happenin’ Mr Jones, and you don’t know what it is, do ya? There has been too much misbehavior and it can no longer be mitigated. We’re not heading into a recession but a major depression, worse than the fabled trauma of the 1930s. That one occurred against the background of a society that had plenty of everything except money. Back then, we had plenty of mineral resources, lots of trained-and-regimented manpower, millions of productive family farms, factories that were practically new, and more than 90 percent left of the greatest petroleum reserve anywhere in the world. It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again, and once it did, we devoted its productive capacity to building an empire of happy motoring leisure. (Tragic choice there.)

This new depression, which I call The Long Emergency, will play out against the background of a society that has pissed away its oil endowment, bulldozed its factories, arbitraged its productive labor, destroyed both family farms and the commercial infrastructure of main street, and trained its population to become overfed diabetic TV zombie “consumers” of other peoples’ productivity, paid for by “money” they haven’t earned.

There is a theory (see Nouriel Roubini’s blog) that a reform process will now ensue in the financial realm, new regulation and oversight of the same old familiar activities. This too, I’m afraid, will prove to be wishful thinking. The financial system will not be reformed until it lies in smoking wreckage, and when that “re-form” happens the armature of the re-organizing society will barely resemble the one that the previous burnt-down-house was designed to dwell in. Among other things, it will not support capital enterprise at anything like the scale that we became accustomed to lately. Globalism will be over. The great nations of the world will be scrambling desperately for the world’s remaining oil supplies. It will not be a friendly contest, and anyone who thinks that current trade relations and capital flows will continue despite that is liable to be disappointed. (Are you reading this Tom Friedman?)

Long before the mathematical projections of oil depletion play out, the oil markets themselves — and all the complex operations that they comprise, such as drilling and exploration, and the movement of tankers around the planet — will destabilize and seize up. We will no longer be any oil exporter’s “favored customer.” Many of the exporters will enjoy watching us suffer. Contrary to the political platitude-du-jour, the USA will never become “energy independent” in the way we currently imagine. Rather we’ll become energy independent by being deprived of imported oil, and we’ll be thrown back on our own dwindling supplies — which means that we’re not going to run our system of daily life the way it has been set up to run. When Americans can no longer run their cars on a whim, they will simply go apeshit and you can kiss normal politics goodbye.

The financial system that emerges from this cataclysm, and the economy it serves (which is supposed to be the master of its capital deployment “arm,” not its servant) will likely be modest to a degree that will shock and embarrass everyone currently connected with what we have lately called finance. If it even trades in paper, that paper will have to stand for something based in reality, either a productive activity or a genuine asset. It may take decades for this society to even regain the confidence necessary to operate such an elementary system — or it may not come back at all, at least as far as the horizon lies before us. That’s how bad the mischief and the damage has been.

It’s not hard to understand why the Bernankes, Paulsons, Lawrence Kudlows and other public representatives of capital keep pretending that everything is under control. On the other side of their pretenses lies disorder and hardship. One wonders, of course, what they really see in their private minds’ eyes. Do they actually believe that the statistics issued by their serveling agencies amount to a plausible picture of reality? Are they so lost in their fantasies of “management” that they think they’re controlling events?

“The truly undecided voter is rare, say those who study the psychology of voting,” Joe Garofoli wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle. “Since neuroscientists say 90 percent of thought is unconscious, an undecided voter may have already decided–he just hasn’t revealed his pick to himself yet.”

Whether I’m a rare bird or a typical victim of self-denial, I didn’t know how I was going to vote until election day–or, to be more precise, a election minute. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of 2008 primary voters have had similar trouble getting their unconscious to talk to them.

Most of the electoral procrastinators are conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats–party loyalists whose influence has been diluted by independents who vote in their primaries. As has been widely discussed, conservatives were unhappy with the entire field of Republican presidential contenders. Less noted but no less significant has been the effect of John Edwards’ departure from the Democratic field.

Lefties don’t have a candidate.

Like most hardcore liberals, I had planned to vote for Edwards. I’m a registered Democrat. I live in New York, a “closed primary” state. That left Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I studied the printed grid inside my mechanical voting machine, a steel beast from the 1950s. New York keeps threatening to replace the classic booths. I hope they keep them forever. Old-school machines have a feature I treasure: you flip a switch to make an “X” appear next to your choice. You’re not committed until you pull the lever to open the curtain; you can flip the switch back and go with someone else instead.

I moved the switch to Hillary, to see how it looked. Hillary. Ted Rall votes for Hillary. I asked myself my usual test question: If she won, and I watched her being sworn in next January, how would I feel?

Bored. And slightly depressed.

I thought about the experience issue, her biggest advantage. “I am offering 35 years of experience making change,” she says. Though way overstated–35 years of what? being a lawyer?–living in the White House has to have left her with some insights. Unlike Obama, Hillary wouldn’t lose her way searching for the restroom. But political dynasties suck. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be a sad statement. A nation of 300 million people shouldn’t keep turning to the same few families for leadership.

A woman president is a couple of centuries overdue. But issues matter more than affirmative action. I couldn’t overlook Clinton’s votes to go to war and to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on the never-ending horror show of Iraq. Thousands of people are dead because of her.

Hillary Clinton didn’t think Iraq had WMDs. No one smart did. The polls were running for the war, and so was she. She pandered. It was disgusting. But I was even more appalled by her lousy political skills. It ought to have been evident, even then, that (a) the war wouldn’t go well, (b) Americans would turn against it, and (c) this would occur before she was up for reelection in 2006. It was obvious to even me at the time, and it took me ten years to get a bachelor’s degree.

She was wrong. She had bad judgment. And her September 2007 vote for possible war against Iran proves she still does. I moved the lever left. The “X” disappeared from Clinton’s box.

I made an “X” pop up next to Obama’s name. “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of…” I wasn’t feeling it.

For what will soon have been eight long years, I reflected, left-of-center Americans have endured an illegitimate administration of morons, thieves and bullies. “[The press secretary’s] job is to help explain my decisions to the American people,” Bush once said, describing how he interacts with people who disagree with him. Bush stacked the Supreme Court by appointing right-wing extremists to replace moderates. Compromise was an alien concept to the Bushies. They did whatever they wanted–wars, torture, tax cuts for the superrich, tapping political dissidents’ phones–and Democrats did nothing to stop them, even after they regained control of both houses of Congress.

After 9/11 Republicans repeatedly screamed that liberals were pro-Islamist, anti-American traitors. Right-wing opinion mongers–Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard (and now The New York Times) accused me of treason. (Hey, I’m not the one trying to get rid of the Bill of Rights.)

Former GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes suggested that I be imprisoned or shot. And “mainstream” Republicans indicated their tacit agreement with cricket-chirping silence. Not once did a Republican Congressman demand that their neo-McCarthyite allies apologize for their statements. Not once did a Republican opinion columnist take issue with equating the Democratic Party with anti-Americanism. Not once. Compare that to the Democratic practice of “Sister Souljah-ing” lefties who annoy the conservative hyenas.

“I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” an Iowa Democrat told The New York Times. So do I. I want them to watch everything they care about disassembled. Take Reagan and Bush’s names off the airports, nationalize major corporations, demolish Gitmo, gay marriage–anything that pisses them off.

I want revenge. Obama preaches reconciliation. “I will create a working majority because I won’t demonize my opponents,” says Obama. The Illinois senator is an interesting politician and might make a good leader. But not yet. Give me eight years of Democratic rule as ruthless and extreme and uncompromising as the last eight years of Bush. Then we can have some bipartisanship.

Obama’s let’s-tiptoe-through-the-tulips-with-the-GOP shtick amounts to bargaining with yourself. If a vendor at a flea market offers to sell you a lamp for $10 and you’re willing to pay $8, you don’t offer $8. Demonize, Barack, demonize!

Oh, and Obama says he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War. I say he’s lying. So do his votes for funding the war since he joined the Senate. His voting record on Iraq is the same as Hillary’s.

Hillary, no. Obama? Nobama. What to do?

“Hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independents who were motivated enough to go and vote on February 5 did so for Edwards, knowing full well that he was out of the running,” reports The Nation. I was one of them.

Terrorism flourishes brazenly at Ground Zero, in the new 7 World Trade Center building. Here can be found a secretive entity of fabulous wealth and power. Kingdom and corporations alike tremble at its shadow and make haste to pay it tribute. I refer to Moodys Investor Services, wholly owned subsidiary of Moody’s Corporation, which reported $2 billion in revenues in 2006.

On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bond rating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the U.S. government “reform” Social Security and Medicare: “In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government’s Aaa rating.”

Steven Hess, Moody’s top analyst for the US economy spelled it out even more explicitly to the London Financial Times: “If no policy changes are made, in 10 years from now we would have to look very seriously at whether the US is still a triple-A creditThe US rating is the anchor of the world’s financial system. If you have a downgrade, you have a problem.”

US interrogators torture men in secret prisons seeking to catch those members of Al Quaeda still at large, starting with Osama bin Laden and Aiman al-Zwahiri. Yet here’s Moody’s man calmly threatening to destroy the US government’s credit ranking unless it follows his agenda, and he strolls around Lower Manhattan unmolested, even if his threats could add up to the financial equvalent of a thermonuclear device planted under the Statue of Liberty.

Moody’s runs a protection game. It issue credit ratings, (in 2007 no less than 39 percent of the global credit rating market by revenue, according to Bloomberg) based on public data and private information made available by those clients that have “voluntarily” retained their services. The price of not volunteering can be high. As vividly described by Alec Klein in his excellent 2004 series in the Washington Post on the credit-rating giants, the giant German insurance corporation Hannover declined repeated Moody’s offers to rate its credit, at a time when the latter was trying to extend its reach in the European Community. Moody’s promptly issued an unsolicited and adverse rating, then–just like a small time mobster after hurling a brick through the window of a liquor store–went back to Hannover and reissued its invitation to offer protection-by-rating. Hannover’s top man said he wouldn’t surrender to blackmail and so between 2001 and 2003 Moody’s steadily reduced Hannover rating all the way down to Junk. This cost Hannover a great deal of money in paying the higher risk premiums on money it borrowed.

By contrast Enron handled relations with Moody’s with ermine gloves. All the way through 2000 until a few days before Enron filed for Chapter 11, Moody’s, like S&P, declined to lower the boom by demoting bonds issued by Enron company to below-investment grade. Banks with huge sums at stake allegedly pressured Moody’s to keep quiet, even though Moody’s had privileged access to Enron’s internal financial operations.

Today, the world’s credit system is strained to bursting point by such financial scams as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) which are bundles of debt instruments, ranging from junk bonds through subprime mortgages. Moody’s and the other rating agencies have played a crucial role in putting the CDOs together in the first place.

Of course the terrorists in lower Manhattan want Wall Street to get its mitts on the pools of money held in the Social Security trust funds. But if Moody’s is going to present itself as a major political player, presuming to dictate national policy down the barrel of a financial gun, its executives and analysts should be hauled into the Star Chamber. Let’s have a war on terror and a rendition of Moody’s executives to explain, before a special investigative committee of congress with full subpoena power, their own role in causing the financial upheavals afflicting the planet right now, due to the collapse of the housing bubble and its impact on the home mortgage market.

As Prof. Robert Pollin of U Mass/Amherst remarked last week to me, “We could say the Bubble and crisis occurred because people like Moody’s rating agency always misread the build up of bubbles. They assume the rise in asset prices represents something fundamentally different about the economy, and then open the floodgates for financial speculation. Based on this, we should rather be talking about the stability of U.S. and global financial markets coming under immediate pressure due to the fact that market analysts, like Moody’s, don’t have a clue as to what they are talking about.”

Right now the US deficit is around $200 billion, 1.5 percent of GDP, not large and presenting no danger in itself to U.S. financial soundness. But as Pollin adds, if Moody’s analysts want to discuss causes of fiscal laxity, “why not look at the Iraq war? The Defense budget for 2006 was $617 billion. That is 4.8 percent of a $13 trillion GDP. Before the Iraq war, the defense budget was about 3.0 percent of GDP. So Iraq alone is costing between $150 – 200 billion annually, about 1.5 percent of GDP.. And what has that war achieved? Social security and medicare combined were about $900 billion in 2006. Why assume we first have to attack our minimal welfare state, and leave the imperial budget intact? “

In fact it’s almost entirely Medicare, not Social Security, that accounts for the projected rising costs in our shrivelled welfare state. The culprit here is not the swelling ranks of older people but the insurance and drug companies’ grip on our health system. Conversion to single-payer would mean huge savings. The U.S. pays around 14 per cent of its gross domestic product for health care, twice what other advanced industrial countries pay. Shift to single payer and quit shoving money–4.8 per cent of GDP–down the imperial sink-hole and there’s no fiscal crisis of any sort, short or long term for Moody’s or anyone else to fret about. And in the even shorter term, if Moody’s sees fiscal crisis looming, why don’t its overpaid executives for once put the national interest first and call for a tax hike on the rich? Bob Pollin tells me that just going back to Clinton, as opposed to Bush-2, on taxes for those making over $200,000 a year, would generate $60 billion a year. Do this and end the war in Iraq and you wipe out the deficit at a stroke.

Let a real war on terror commence!

Amid its blackmailing threats to launch a terrorist onslaught on the credit rating of the United States, Moody’s has its moments of honesty about the capitalist rackets in which it is a major player. Witness its extraordinarily forthright recent background document, “Archaeology of the Crisis”, part of its series, “Moody’s Global Financial Risk Perspectives” “In the financial industry, in contrast with other businesses, there is a point beyond which increased competition is not stability-enhancing, but rather potentially destabilizing past a certain point–difficult to identify–more competition means more, and perhaps socially undesirable risk-taking.”

With bracing frankness Moody’s archeologist of capitalism concedes ” it is also possible that the welfare benefits of some financial innovations may be lower than expected Accepting the existence of crisis is the Faustian pact that policymakers have made with the financial industry. However, the pact is an implicit one, as policymakers are reluctant to concede that they will have to intervene in extreme situations–that is when almost no capital cushions could be large enough to absorb truly exceptional problems.”

In other words, says Moody’s man, capitalism is impelled by competitive pressures that are often profoundly anti-social in consequence and lurches from lurches from crisis to crisis, — on average roughly 7.5 years apart since the late 1800s, as the late Charles Kindleberger once demonstrated — that in the end require the intervention of the state, which has to save the system from the consequences of the market’s excesses–which is why we have the scant protections we do, such as Medicare and Social Security.

Wheelchair dumping is a relatively new term and age-old phenomenon. Few people ever heard of wheelchair dumping until this week. Thanks to a surveillance videotape and websites such as You Tube many of us know about Brian Sterner, a quadriplegic, who was literally dumped out of his wheelchair by a Tampa Florida police officer on January 29. The videotape is damning.

Conversely, the lack of any action on the part of the other police officers present that witnessed what happened to Sterner was equally inexcusable.

Even I, a hardened crippled man accustomed to social abuse, was shocked to see Sterner on the ground as officers casually laughed, put on plastic gloves and proceeded to frisk Sterner. The tape shows Sterner’s body was moved front to back, his pants askew, as though he were a sack of potatoes. This was not a scene from Cool Hand Luke where hardened criminals are treated brutally. Sterner, a quadriplegic, represented no physical threat.

What particularly fascinated me was one aspect of the press coverage. Headlines exploded across the United States and abroad. A random sampling includes: “Deputy dumped quadriplegic out of wheelchair” (MSNBC), “Deputies Suspended for Wheelchair dump” (AP), “Police dumped paralyzed man” (BBC News), “Fla. Deputy dumps quadriplegic from chair” (WFAA TX). Many news stories failed to mention an important part of the story: the actual name of the human being who was dumped out of his wheelchair. Thus the assault on Sterner did not end at the Tampa police department. The nameless Sterner was not fully human. He was merely “paralyzed”, “paraplegic”, “quadriplegic”.

This story brought two thoughts to mind: first, after my father died two years ago I needed to get my fingerprints taken. My father owned thoroughbred racehorses and most states, including New York where I reside, require all registered race horse-horse owners have their fingerprints taken and kept on file. I went to the local police station to have my prints taken only to discover there was no wheelchair access. I then went to the nearest New York State police department and there was no wheelchair access to this building either. Eventually I found a police station that was accessible — that is unless I was arrested. All the holding cells were impossible enter. This was comforting and alarming. I asked the officer who took my prints about wheelchair access and his reply was “don’t get arrested and you will not have a problem”. These were not comforting words. What I did not and should have said to this officer was that buildings housing police offices were required by the ADA circa 1990 to be accessible, a law that the town has ignored for 15 years.

The second thing that sprang to mind when I read and saw the raw video of a fellow crippled man being dumped out of his wheelchair was how common this has become. Here I am not referring to a horde of paralyzed people who are dumped out of their wheelchair by the police but rather the phenomenon and term “wheelchair dumping” itself. This phenomenon is not restricted to people that use wheelchairs. I consider “wheelchair dumping” to be a broader term that refers to all those who have a physical or mental deficit whose existence is no longer valued. The people that are dumped are generally poor, many elderly, often have no home to go to, lack adequate health insurance, and are estranged from family and friends. The people that are dumped are not wanted by a host of institutions such as my local police station, jails, mental institutions, rehabilitation hospitals, half way houses, homeless shelters etc. Sterner is thus far from unusual. Indeed the only surprise was that the actions of the officer that arrested him were caught on videotape. No tape no story.

This is not speculation. This is a fact. “Dumping” is a convenient, cost-effective way of eliminating people who have no social standing. Such events appear in the news with alarming regularity but are quickly forgotten. They are never perceived as a violation of a person’s civil rights. For example, last month Gabino Olvera, a mentally ill paraplegic man was dumped on Skid Row. Hollywood Presbyterian medical Center “discharged” Olvera in a soiled hospital gown without a wheelchair. Several witnesses reported that Olvera was clutching hospital documents between his teeth and was crawling back toward the van that dumped him on the street.

Wheelchair dumping is the antithesis of inclusion. Disability rights activists coined the term inclusion over the well-known concept mainstreaming. For nearly two decades disabled people have fought to be included, their existence valued. This effort has met stiff resistance — especially in the court and educational system. Disability rights activists have fought for inclusion because it reflects the idea that all members of society are equal and capable. In theory this idea is accepted but rarely if ever put into practice. It’s easier and cheaper to ignore the rights of disabled people and “dump” all those who don’t fit in. In the past we had institutions to dump people into — most of which were closed in the 1980s, thanks to Ronald Reagan. In their place we have a host of inaccessible facilities, like my local police station, or other government facilities, many of which contain “resource rooms”. The vast majority of these rooms accomplish what institutions once did — segregate those that are not wanted. It is easier for institutions such as public schools to “dump” all children with learning disabilities into a “resource room” than include them in classrooms with other children. If the parent or child balks, they can deem the child disruptive and the district can literally force the child out of the district and into “special programs”. It is up to the parent to hire experts and prove their child is not a disruption to other students. To me, this is the legacy that Reagan should be known for because he took dumping to an extreme — especially for those with mental illnesses who were dumped on urban street corners across the country.

Since the 1980s, I have seen this phenomenon of dumping spread inexorably. All sorts of people from police officers like the one who tipped Sterner out of his wheelchair, to hospital and school administrators, can now dump people they deem objectionable. The Sterner case is out of the norm in that the abuse he was endured was caught on videotape and involved a man who was not afraid to assert his rights (Sterner was the former director of the Florida Spinal Cord Injury Source Center and is currently working on his PhD). Sterner was arrested on a traffic related charge. Last fall he blocked an intersection with his car, was accused of fleeing an officer, and did not show up for a court appointment. Sterner readily admits he made mistakes that led to his arrest. He also says that when he was in the booking room of the Orient Road Jail, he told the arresting officer that he was a quadriplegic and could not stand up. According to officers, Sterner made a number of stupid comments, hardly justification for abuse. Apparently the arresting deputy did not believe Sterner was paralyzed and became agitated when he said he could not stand. This is when Sterner was unceremoniously dumped out of his wheelchair to the ground and frisked. The local sheriff in Tampa has publicly apologized to Sterner and the officer that arrested Sterner and those present when he was dumped out of his wheelchair was suspended and has now been charged with a third-degree felony, abuse of a disabled person. In his apology to Sterner the sheriff pointed out that over “72,000 inmates were processed through central booking, more than 230 of them came to jail in wheelchairs”. I sincerely doubt these words are comforting to Sterner.

Two thoughts: why was Sterner not using his own wheelchair instead of a markedly inferior jailhouse special.

Sterner, so often the nameless cripple, constrasts with Rodney King, a name that has instant recognition. Unless the media radically changes the way it has covered this case, Sterner will remain anonymous, reduced to “paralyzed man”, a secondary assault Mr. King was never subjected to.

Wheelchair dumping is not a new phenomenon. As noted in a history of the Black Panthers, in February 1945 Blues singer Blind Willie Johnson died of pneumonia after being denied hospital treatment. He was barred from the hospital not cause he was black but because he was blind. Wheelchair dumping is also not to be confused with “patient dumping”. There are laws against patient dumping. There are no laws to protect disabled people from wheelchair dumping. This has not prevented Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum from asking his Office of Civil Rights to review the video (the Hillsborough County Sheriff Office will cooperate fully). If McCollem’s office finds deputy’s violated Sterner’s civil rights it could sue on his behalf for up to $10,000 per infraction.

In spite of the obvious civil rights violation not one mainstream news outlet has stated the obvious or framed the story within the realm of civil rights. Sterner and other disabled Americans are routinely discriminated against yet of the hundreds of stories I read only one has a direct quote from Sterner stating as much. In a February 13 report by KXAN Sterner is quoted as stating “Do I believe people with disabilities have been getting the shaft for a long time? Yea. Do I want to do something about it? Yes. Absolutely.”

Within the disabled community there is much outrage — shock really, and the grim reminder that somehow the rights of those that have a physical deficit are somehow different. There is no question in my mind that Sterner was the victim of a hate crime. Why, I wonder, is this so hard to accept? Instead, replies posted to news reports all harp on the same thing, pity: no police officer should hurt a poor defenseless disabled person. There is outrage but it is grossly misplaced. What needs to be done is clear: first, disabled people must assert their civil rights — even if under less than desirable conditions — and their bipedal peers must support this effort. Second, we should follow the lead of the British disability rights group Disability Now and create a highly public hate crime dossier.

Disability Now has created “No Hiding Place” as part of their website that consists of a dossier of crimes against disabled people. It is categorized by impairment and lists the responses given by the Crown Protection Service (police forces involved). This is hardly a solution to hate crimes against disabled people but at least represents a start toward framing the issue as a civil rights violation.

Or Kyrgyzstan. Or Turkmenistan. But as your kids will be fighting there among the oil pipes, you should kiss Ted Rall’s crazy ass for going there first – and getting it all down in a book of dead-on cartoons and reportage, Silk Road to Ruin.

Rall almost didn’t make it back. The Taliban who was supposed to execute Rall spoke English – the gunman picked it up as an NYU grad student. As happens when two guys from New York get together, they talked about New York women. Rall told his executioner that you could learn a lot about women by looking at their legs. The Talib said he looks at their eyes. “Not like you got much choice,” Ted opined, noting the draped figures nearby.

This was, by definition, gallows humor. Lucky for Ted, the fanatic shooter needed a couple of chuckles. We all do. And Ted gives us plenty to laugh at in his journey through a horrific wonderland run by a gaggle of lunatic, blood-guzzling dictators (in other words, allies in our War on Terror) where locals play hockey with goat heads.

Silk Road even includes the recipe of Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov, for boiling dissidents alive. (I suggest you skip page 160 where Rall includes a photo of a boiled father of four.)

Instead of a bullet through Rall’s head, the Taliban gave him a “safe-conduct” pass. But Rall’s conduct was anything but safe. When, recently, Bill Clinton flew to Kazakhstan to cuddle up to the dictator Nursultan Nazarbeyev, he was ferried in on private jet of a high-roller locking in a creepy deal for Kazakh uranium. Rall, apparently, missed the jet.

Instead, Rall caroms through the ‘Stans by bus, barfing and bribing and joking his way past sex-starved, over-armed fanatics and avaricious body guards. He’s too whacked by dehydration and diarrhea to worry about the stark-raving danger of such a journey in war-time (it’s always war time in the ‘Stans) to tell us the story you won’t find in the captions of Bill shaking hands with a despot du jour.

Ultimately, what Rall’s story is about is what everything’s all about: oil. The ‘Stans are drenched in it, floating on it, or in the way of it. Thus, the book’s sub-title, “Is Central Asia the New Middle East?”

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has become a media parade on its way to a coronation. Journalists and leading Democrats have done shockingly little to pin Obama down, to hold him specifically responsible for anything beyond his slogans of “yes we can” and “change we can believe in”. Prominent Black Democrats, many ministers and the traditional Black leadership class are doing less than anybody to hold Obama accountable, peddling instead a supposed racial obligation among African Americans to support this second coming of Joshua and his campaign as “the movement” itself. What would holding Barack Obama accountable on war and peace, on social security, health care and other issues look like, and is it possible to hold a political “rock star” accountable at all?

Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will others. The stakes are too high not to.

How We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003

Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for national office since the early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and political organizer, had worked with Obama in 1992’s highly successful Project VOTE Illinois registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch with events at home, and was well aware of Obama’s run for the US Senate.

While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the DLC’s “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently featured as one of the DLC’s favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news because the DLC was and still is the right wing’s Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.

The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who make large campaign donations have more say in the Democratic party than do flesh and blood Democratic voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining and questioning the records, the policy stands and the persons of officeholders and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy recipients of elite largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right wing policy advisers beholden to those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money donors.

Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars, wholesale privatization of government functions including social security, and in so-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor rights agreements. Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing.

I revisited Obama’s primary election campaign web site, something I had not done for a month or two. To my dismay I found the 2002 antiwar speech, the same one which Barack Obama touts to this day as evidence of his antiwar backbone and prescience, which had been prominently featured before, had vanished from his web site, along with all other evidence that Obama had ever taken a plain spoken stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the president riding high in the polls, and Illinois’ Black and antiwar vote safely in his pocket, Obama appeared to be running away from his opposition to the war, and from the Democratic party’s base. Free, at last.

After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch” that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.

Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.

It was our June 2003 exchange with candidate Obama that prompted him to restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as before, the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and consistent opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him to distinguish himself as an authentic progressive on single payer national health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA. And it was our public exposure of the fact and implications of the DLC’s embrace of Obama’s career which caused him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership Council. We didn’t do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as agitators.

Holding Barack Obama Accountable in 2008

That was then. This is now.

The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not.

To cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself as “the movement”, the continuation and fulfillment of Dr. King’s legacy. But the speeches of its candidate carefully limit the application of all his troop withdrawal statements to “combat troops” and “combat brigades”, omitting the six figure number of armed mercenary contractors in Iraq, along with “training”, “counterinsurgency” and other kinds of troops. Obama also presses for an expansion of the US Army and Marines by more than 100,000 troops and a larger military budget even than the Bush regime. The fact that both these stands fly in the face of the legacy of Martin Luther King, and flatly contradict the wishes of most Democratic voters is utterly invisible in the establishment media, and in the discourse of established Black leaders on the Obama campaign. The average voter is ill-equipped to read Obama’s statements on these and other issues as closely as one might read a predatory loan application or a jacked up insurance policy, trying to determine exactly what is covered.

As we pointed out back in December

The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases like “new leadership,” “new ideas,” “a politics of hope,” and “let’s dream America again” calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as “the candidate of hope,” and anointed representative of the “Joshua generation.” There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say “change we can believe in” instead of “stop the war — vote Obama” or “repeal NAFTA – Barack in ‘08.” The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.

Who Will Speak Truth to Power? And When?

No less a luminary than Dr. Michael Eric Dyson last month asserted that the time to pressure Obama to cut the military budget would not come till after the election when, as he said “we have a seat at the table.” We think this is transparently wrong. Obama responded to our calling him out in 2003 because he was still in an election campaign, and needed every vote he could get. The day after the election, he could have ignored us with relative safety, just as Cheney and Bush ignore their approval ratings in the twenty and thirty percent range the last three years and more.

But in 2003 Obama was a mere mortal. Now corporate media have made him a rock star, Joshua, a prince on his way to a coronation. Those who raise questions about Obama’s commitment to a progressive agenda will have to struggle to be heard. That’s just the way it is. They may even have to be impolite at times. That’s just the way it is too. Rock stars, royalty and the uncritical adulation they require make little room for polite criticism or democratic discussion.

Third party runs for the presidency have sometimes succeeded in exerting leftward pressure on Democratic presidential candidates. The best example is 1948, when Henry Wallace campaigned for president on the Progressive Party ticket with Paul Robeson at his side defying Jim Crow laws in dozens of states. It was this credible threat on the part of the Progressive Party to peel Black voters away from the Democratic party which led Truman to issue his election year executive order de-segregating the armed forces. This year, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have both declared their intention to explore presidential candidacies this year outside the Democratic party. Both have exemplary records of public service. Neither is a hater. Both are agitators in the best sense of that word. If Barack Obama, or for that matter Hillary Clinton is to be the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s time they felt the heat to line up with Democratic voters, rather than with the DLC and the party’s biggest donors.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton, also a corporate DLC candidate to the core, may have been more responsive to some heat from the party’s grassroots on a few questions than Barack Obama. Clinton has at least promised to repeal No Child Left Behind, the legislation that has forced an unproven and unworkable “teach to the test” regime upon public schools nationwide, and carved tens of billions nationwide from the budgets of schools to foster a privatized, for-profit education industry. By contrast, Obama is still mumbling about “adequately funding” this failed and malevolent educational experiment. Similarly, in a California debate which showed the tiny differences between the Democratic front runners, it was Hillary Clinton who broke the corporate taboo by at least mentioning single payer, the workable universal health care system implemented by every other advanced industrial country on earth and favored by most American voters. Clinton didn’t do this because she loves us, or because she is innately more progressive than Obama. She did it because she hard pressed and because activists are less confused and less likely to he silenced by the pernicious notion that her campaign is “the movement” itself.

It’s time for a little less respect for the high and mighty of either party, and a little more action. It’s high time for activists inside and outside the Democratic party to look for creative, innovative, sometimes impolite and civilly disobedient ways to reach larger audiences as they speak truth to the powerful. Even and especially when those in power are nominal Democrats.

Below are links to the original pages in which we called Barack Obama out for apparently running away from his early opposition to the war, and his ties with the DLC:

This is the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator, with the story “In Search of the Real Barack Obama” www.blackcommentator.com/45/issue_45.html

This is the June 12, 2003 issue of Black Commentator with the DLC story www.blackcommentator.com/46/issue_46.html

On June 19, 2003 we printed Obama’s response and his reason for eliminating the speech from his web site. He said the web site was for current stuff implied with the “formal” end to hostilities in Iraq it was “outdated” and removed by his staff to make room for more current stuff. Yeah. Right. www.blackcommentator.com/47/issue_47.html

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said on Sunday in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth,” said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Sheikhly told a news conference in the capital that water pipes, where they exist, are so old that it is not possible to pump water at a sufficient rate to meet demands — leaving many neighbourhoods parched.

A sharp deficit of 3,000 megawatts of electricity adds to the woes of residents, who are forced to rely on neighbourhood generators to light up their lives and heat their homes.

“Sewerage, water and electricity are our three main problems,” said Sheikhly, adding that many of these problems date back to the Saddam Hussein regime when not enough attention was paid to basic infrastructure.

Insurgency, sectarian violence and vandalism since the US-led invasion in March 2003 had further ravaged services in the capital, he added.

More positively, he said, the extensive Baghdad security plan, known as Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) and launched on February 14 last year, was allowing services to be gradually restored.

“After the destruction there is now the reconstruction,” Sheikhly said. “We have solved many of the security problems, now we can focus on rebuilding.”

Education and health across Iraq had both seen improvements, according to US military commander Brigadier General Jeffrey Dorko of the US Gulf Regional Division which is engaged in reconstruction projects.

Dorko told the news conference that 76 new health clinics — 21 of them in Baghdad — had been built while 1,885 new schools had been constructed countrywide and another 1,604 repaired.

He said that the demand for electricity was likely to outstrip supply for several years because many Iraqi power stations had been damaged or destroyed and commissioning new ones would take anything up to four years.

Demand was increasing, Dorko added, because Iraqis were increasingly buying electrical appliances as the security situation improved.

Asked if it may take 10 years before Baghdad receives full power 24 hours a day, he replied: “There are so many variables… but I think it will be less than 10 years.”

Sheikhly believed that once the annual budget is approved by parliament — possibly on Monday — new funds would allow a faster roll-out of services in the beleaguered capital.

Iraqi capital fears an epidemic if stricken sewerage system collapses as the rainy season arrives

Baghdad is facing a ‘catastrophe’ with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.

The disease – spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death – threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the Iraqi government. ‘We have a catastrophe in Baghdad,’ an official said.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said 101 cases had been recorded in the city, making up 79 per cent of all new cases in Iraq. It added that no single source for the upsurge had been identified, but the main Shia enclave of Sadr City was among the areas hardest hit.

As Iraq’s rainy season nears, its aging water pipes and sewerage systems, many damaged or destroyed by more than four years of war, pose a new threat to a population weary of crisis. Claire Hajaj, a spokeswoman for Unicef, said: ‘Iraq’s water and sanitation networks are in a critical condition. Pollution of waterways by raw sewage is perhaps the greatest environmental and public health hazard facing Iraqis – particularly children. Waterborne diarrhea diseases kill and sicken more Iraqi children than anything except pneumonia. We estimate that only one in three Iraqi children can rely on a safe water source – with Baghdad and southern cities most affected.’

Although US forces in Baghdad have found that security is improving, on daily patrols they face complaints from residents about streets plagued by piles of household waste and fetid cesspools, often near schools and where children are playing. Captain Richard Dos Santos, attached to the 3rd squadron of the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, said that in the al-Hadar area of south Baghdad sewage pumps were only 30 to 40 per cent operational. ‘There is sewage near schools and there is an increased threat of cholera and flu in winter when resistance is low,’ he said.

The UN has reported 22 deaths from cholera this year, and 4,569 laboratory-confirmed cases, almost exclusively in northern Iraq where it was first detected in Kirkuk in August. It has now spread to half of the country’s 18 provinces, but anxiety is focused on Baghdad.

Unicef said it was providing oral rehydration salts and water purification tablets for families – it distributed three million to the worst hit areas two weeks ago – as well as jerry cans at water distribution points. It is transporting 180,000 liters (47,552 gallons) of safe water per day to Baghdad’s worst hit districts.

Unicef issued an urgent appeal to the Iraqi government to clean water storage tanks in all institutions as one preventive measure. Hajaj said: ‘Only 20 per cent of families outside Baghdad have access to sewage services, and Iraq’s sewage treatment plants operate at just 17 per cent of capacity.’

Cholera is preventable by treating drinking water with chlorine and improving hygiene, but it is estimated that around 70 per cent of Iraqis do not have access to clean water. Many have been too poor or too afraid to go out to buy bottled water, relying instead on tap water, often from polluted sources. Companies responsible for collecting waste and sewage have been reluctant to enter Baghdad’s most violent areas.

The government has been trying to educate Iraqis through advertisements on TV and in newspapers and with leaflets handed out at checkpoints. But it admits that six hospitals have unsafe water supplies.

BAQUBA, Feb 11 (IPS) – The violence around the continuing U.S. military operations in this city has robbed children of their childhood.

Only two provincial schools and one private kindergarten school are functioning in this city of 280,000, located 50 km north of Baghdad. Most children know neither school nor play.

Or even the food they want. “We parents can hardly meet the basic requirements of food,” Mahdi Hassan, a father of four, told IPS.

“Nobody even mentions chocolate or pastries or anything else because Iraqis know they are not important,” Baquba resident Wissam Jafar told IPS. “Children eat what the other members of the family eat. Toys and games are offered only at festivals and on special occasions.”

Baquba city, capital of Diyala province, has been at the centre of major U.S. military operations to fight al-Qaeda like forces. People have suffered from the violence from both sides.

By now Iraq has seen a generation of children pass with just survival a major issue. During the period of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, more than half a million children died, according to the United Nations.

In 1996, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS ླྀ Minutes’ show if she thought the price of half a million dead children was worth it. She replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

One in eight children in Iraq died during that period of malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicine.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq during March 2003 brought hope that things might change, but that change has only been for the worse.

“During the nineties, they were malnourished but they could find a place to play in the streets,” Khalid Ali, a local economist, told IPS. “Nowadays, they cannot even get out of their home because of the violence. And a large number of children have been killed through the violence.”

There is one park in Baquba with some basic swings for children; another was recently renovated by an Iraqi NGO. Both get overcrowded on festivals and holidays. Parents feel obliged to take their children out on these days, despite the risk.

On other days, no more than two or three families visit the parks.

Sajid Asim who earns 175 dollars a month from his job in the water department says the money is barely enough for food for the family. “Surely, there won’t be any extra money to bring the children special food or clothes, or games, or even taking them to picnics.” For those without work — and there are many — the situation is worse.

Schoolteachers and managers spoke to IPS of the problems facing children who do manage to go to school.

“Teaching has been hit by the political situation in Iraq,” said Salma Majid, manager of a local primary school. “Children can often not get to the school, and we may have more than three days off in a week. The whole academic year may be delayed because the violence has been so extreme this year.”

Schools can provide children a chance to play but sometimes it is not safe,” she said. “A number of school buildings have been hit by mortar.”

According to an Oxfam report on Iraq released Jul. 30, “92 percent of children had learning impediments that are largely attributable to the current climate of fear. Schools are regularly closed as teachers and pupils are too fearful to attend. Over 800,000 children may now be out of school, according to a recent estimate by Save the Children UK — up from 600,000 in 2004.”

The Oxfam report also said that child malnutrition rates in Iraq have risen from 19 percent before the invasion in 2003, to 28 percent. “More than 11 percent of newborn babies were born underweight in 2006, compared with 4 percent in 2003.”

Scarcity has brought all sorts of difficulties for children. “I put a sandwich in the bag for my son to take to school,” said a mother who declined to give her name. “When he got back home, he said he could not have it because his classmates do not bring their own sandwiches; their parents do not give them sandwiches.”

A local primary school teacher, Ali Abbas, said it is common now for students to arrive at school without breakfast.

“One day, one of the children suddenly passed out,” Abbas said. “We immediately took her to the administration room. When she regained consciousness, I asked her why she fainted. She told me that she did not have breakfast because there was no breakfast at home.”

There have been far too few accountability moments since Democrats retook control of the U.S. House and Senate in January, 2007.

But one came Thursday, when the House voted 223-32 to hold former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas to testify before Congress in relation to the firing of nine United States Attorneys in 2006.

A pair of resolutions — one that directs the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. to bring criminal contempt charges against Bolten and Miers to a grand jury and another that authorizes the House general counsel to bring a civil suit against the White House to settle the question of whether the testimony of Bolten and Miers should be covered by executive privilege — received the backing of 220 Democrats and three anti-war Republicans (Ron Paul, the renegade presidential candidate from Texas; Wayne Gilchrest, who lost his seat in a Maryland primary Tuesday; and Walter Jones of North Carolina).

The move was opposed by 31 Republicans and one Democrat (Texan Henry Cuellar, who backed Bush for reelection in 2004 and this year backs Hillary Clinton.) At the behest of House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, 163 Republicans were recorded as “not voting.” Ten Democrats did the same.

Thursday’s House decision was historic, not just for its specific response to the lawlessness of two prominent members of the Bush-Cheney administration but for its broader message. With this action, Congress is beginning to reassert itself as a separate and equal branch of the federal government.

If the imperial presidency is to be ended, however, it will take more than an accountability moment.

The House Judiciary Committee and the House as a whole – which delayed the contempt vote for far too many months because of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s misguided caution about confronting the administration – must now aggressively pursue Miers and Bolten.

As American Freedom Campaign campaigns director Steve Fox correctly notes, “In order for our system of checks and balances to be effective, Congress must have oversight over the executive branch. When Bolten and Miers – with the encouragement of the President – refused to comply with the congressional subpoenas last summer, they were tacitly saying that this oversight power no longer existed. If they are not held in contempt — and prosecuted in the courts — our Constitution will have been defiled.”

But nothing that is wrong with the Bush-Cheney administration or the federal government began with Miers and Bolten. And no fix will be complete if it stops with them.

The Judiciary Committee must hold to account the president and vice president who encouraged Miers and Bolten to disregard the rule of law.

Miers and Bolten refused to testify not as individuals but as members of an administration that has assaulted the constitutionally-defined system of checks and balances at every turn. They acted always, and in every way, at the behest of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

It is important to hold the former counsel and the current chief of staff to account. Certainly, as People For the American Way Director of Public Policy Tanya Clay House says, “Congress has a responsibility to enforce its congressional powers, and moving forward with contempt citations is the appropriate response to this administration’s stonewalling and arrogance.”

But this “appropriate response” must not be seen as an end in itself.

For there to be accountability, more than a moment is required. And more than Miers and Bolten must be held to account for the high crimes and misdemeanors of an administration that has treated the Constitution and the Congress as afterthoughts.

“Members of the Bush administration have spent the last seven years pretending that the law doesn’t apply to them,” says House, who musters proper passion to add, “Congress has a responsibility to enforce its congressional powers, and moving forward with contempt citations is the appropriate response to this administration’s stonewalling and arrogance.”

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”