The Rag Blog

13/01/08 “ICH ” — — Bush & his Bandits have been watching too much FOX Television. Someone needs to tell George that he’s not living an episode of “24,” and that his view of a national threat is being influenced by believing in too many of his own skewed fantasies about national security. (1)

In view of yesterday’s declaration by the Media that ‘all States will comply with the National ID Act by this coming May, or their citizens will be refused permission to fly’ – the governor’s of the States within the United States need to rebel, as a body, against this completely unwarranted ORDER from the White House via Michael Chertoff, whose own US citizenship is in doubt. (2)

When the Decider took away the State’s National Guard Units, to use them for his private war on Iraq: Bush violated both the spirit and the reasons behind the need for the National Guard in the first place. There are over two and half million men and women in US military uniforms, but apparently that was not enough force to complete his failed mission in Iraq. He claimed to NEED the services and equipment of all our National Guard units as well.

Has anyone in the thoroughly tarnished administration even heard of “states rights” – maybe the State’s of the United States have NO RIGHTS AT ALL anymore! We know people no longer have any rights in the USA – now the same is apparently true for our supposedly sovereign States as well? (3)

However Bush has now gone further—he is threatening the citizens of every State that has made a choice against the National ID Card Act, with refusing to allow their citizens to fly. Bush has exceeded his authority because apparently he has never understood that in this country the individual States do have rights, especially when they confront the Federal Government. We have not yet become a total dictatorship!

This new “law” came into existence in complete secrecy, and was signed into law on 5-5-05. Why was it exactly that congress needed to pass the Real ID card legislation without ANY public discussion at all: and then after this piece of national treachery was signed, why was it essentially hidden by a near total news blackout – until now?

Its one thing to tell the nation what is needed – but another thing entirely to just pass a law by fiat – and then compound this obscenity by threatening to bar citizens from flying unless their individual States comply with the autocratic-will of an out-of-control executive branch. (4)

First this government (the same one that was supposedly blind-sided by 911) needs to conclusively prove to every citizen that they KNOW anything at all about “SECURITY” or data theft – and then the nation needs to have an open and very public discussion about the specifics of the supposed ‘need’ for this national ID Card.

Security does not come from make-believe credentials that can always be forged—the record of this fact goes all the way back to the very earliest beginning of recorded history itself. Real security involves using ‘intelligence’ to detect plans before they can commence. But in this case there has only been the total failure of ‘our’ supposed Airport Security Screeners, (TSA) virtually every time they’ve been actually tested. – and there have been no further attempted hijackings: Ergo what “threat” are these Bandits going to protect us from?

Yesterday’s ‘demand’ also contained warnings about some need to prevent con men and others from fraudulently stealing identities and other minor crimes – this is not enough reason to subject every American citizen to divulging all their personal information to any jerk with a badge, that might think a given person might present a problem. In fact that’s why the Amendments to the Constitution were written—specifically to protect PEOPLE from the government; and NOT the other way round.

To solve this current attack upon the right of citizens and States to refuse to abide by a secretly written federal mandate: The States should jointly refuse to collect Federal Income Taxes for the federal government, until Chertoff is sent back to Israel, and Bush rescinds this bogus threat against the rights of every American citizen to be secure in their person, their papers, and their lives.

Chertoff does not make the laws, and the Congress had the obligation to publicly debate this obscenity before they passed it—just as the media had an obligation to report on this ‘ACT’ at the time. None of this was done in the interests of the public that is now expected to not only suffer from it, but to pay for it as well. The Constitution is clear about how legislation is to be handled, so that the public is represented in ALL matters that concern the freedom and the individuality of both the States and the people.

This is an attempt by the administration to begin to turn this nation into a very thinly disguised concentration camp, and they must be stopped cold in this flagrant and illegal imposition against the people of this country!

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net.

13/01/08 “ICH” — NEW YORK—The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has painted a dramatic picture of the situation of children in Iraq and warned that increased assistance is needed to improve their dire situation.

According to UNICEF, an estimated two million children suffer from poor nutrition, disease, and interrupted education. One child dies every five minutes because of the war, and many more are left with severe injuries.

Of the estimated four million Iraqis who have been internally displaced or who have left the country, one and a half million are children. For the most part, those remaining don’t have access to basic health care, education, shelter, potable water, and sanitation.

Sick or injured children, who could otherwise be treated by simple means, are left to die in the hundreds because they don’t have access to basic medicines or other resources.

Children who have lost hands, feet, or other limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated. This is the assessment of 100 British and Iraqi physicians.

An Iraqi girl fills a tin with drinking water from a water pipe crossing an uncovered sewage canal at the area of Fdailiyah southeast of Baghdad. Many of Baghdad’s neighborhoods lack essential infrastructure such as power and clean water. (Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP/Getty Images)According to UN Security Council Resolution 1483, both the United States and Great Britain are recognized as Iraq’s occupying powers and as such are bound by The Hague and Geneva Conventions that demand that they be responsible not only for maintaining order, but also for responding to the medical needs of the population.

The number of Iraqi children who are born underweight or suffer from malnutrition continues to rise and is now higher than before the U.S.-led invasion, according to a report by OXFAM and 80 other aid agencies.

Iraqi children’s malnutrition rates are on a par with Burundi, a central African country torn by a brutal civil war, and higher than Uganda and Bolivia. Almost a third of the population, 8 million people, needs emergency aid, and more than four million Iraqis depend on food assistance.

The collapse of basic services affects the whole population. Seventy percent of Iraqis lack access to adequate water supplies and 80 percent lack effective sanitation, both conditions breeding grounds for a parallel increase in intestinal and respiratory infections that predominantly affect children.

Children are dying every day because of lack of essential medical support. The bad sewage system and lack of purified water, particularly in suburbs, has been a serious problem which might take years to solve, said Ahmed Obeid, an official at the Ministry of Health.

Lack of drinkable water and adequate sanitation significantly worsens the cholera epidemic now facing the country. While in developed countries cholera can be easily treated, in countries at war it can kill children in a few hours.

At the same time, a variety of environmentally-related chronic diseases are emerging among children due to their exposure to environmental contaminants. Many cases of congenital malformations and cancer among children are believed to be the consequence of exposure to chemicals and radioactive materials that have significantly increased during the war.

And then there is what is euphemistically called “collateral damage,” the hundreds of children killed by roadside bombs during suicide attacks or attacks by the occupation forces.

Last February, the Association of Psychologists of Iraq (API) released a report addressing the effect of the war on the psychological development of Iraqi children. More than 1,000 children were interviewed countrywide for the report. Among the children examined, 92 percent had learning impediments, mostly attributable to the climate of fear and insecurity.

“The only thing [children] have on their minds are guns, bullets, death, and a fear of the U.S. occupation,” said Maruan Abdullah, the API spokesman.

Equally tragic is the fate of children affected by serious diseases, some of whom have been abandoned by their parents, unable to take care of them, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

According to a local non-governmental organization, Keeping the Children Alive (KCA), over 700 children have been abandoned by their parents in Baghdad alone since January 2006. Many among them end up living on the streets, part of the 1.6 million children under the age of 12 who have become homeless in Iraq, according to Iraq’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.

Despite all evidence, some political leaders continue to insist that the situation in Iraq is improving, as though the brutal TV images of the war were part of the collective imagination, as if the continuous carnage in Iraq’s main cities had truly stopped.

The chasm between the people’s view of reality and that of their leaders has rarely been greater. That those who pay the highest price are innocent children is the most severe indictment against the war.

The United States political process bears an uncanny resemblance to mainstream filmmaking. Elections and speeches are scripted to the letter, politicians put on a tirelessly rehearsed act, catering endlessly to the whims of the target audience. A successful Hollywood filmmaker can’t afford to risk raising issues in a way that don’t immediately reflect audience sympathies. Good politicians vying for votes are similar in that they speak according to the already existing expectations — and prejudices — of the voting public.

Rarely do candidates stand behind a podium without amending or overriding their personal beliefs in return for generating applause. You would hardly hear, for example, of a US presidential candidate getting booed by an audience.

Candidates do not bring fresh principals to the table, but instead shape their views based on what national and local polls tell them matters to the voting public. And what matters is largely manipulated by the media and the state. Their combined scare tactics convinced most Americans of outright falsehoods, such as Saddam’s ties to 9/11, his stockpiles of WMDs, the “liberation” of women in Afghanistan, and so forth.

In a healthy democracy, the media is expected to represent the interests of the people — all the people, while the government serves as a conduit to carry and defend these interests without violating the constitution. But in the age of evangelical fanatics, lobby groups, international corporations and lucrative Iraq contracts, democracy itself can be placed on hold.

Indeed, maintaining the image of a democracy while violating its genuine principles has consumed the efforts of successive US administrations. No other administration, however, has compromised the interest of the American people and flouted the constitution as much as the brazen Bush administration. No wonder Republicans were squarely defeated in the Congressional elections of 2006. Americans clearly voted for change, but change in a system so skilfully corrupt doesn’t come easy. The way in which Democrats supported the recent spending bill for 2008, their vacillating stance on Iraq, and their downright hawkish stance on Iran say volumes about their contribution to maintaining the status quo.

Democrats are also bound by the rules of the game. They need the money, media coverage and lobbyists. Currently there are 35,000 registered federal lobbyists representing all sorts of special interests, including foreign powers such as Israel, whose collaborative role in the Iraq fiasco is too blatant to overlook.

Barack Obama, who does indeed have little experience of understanding how the system works still possesses a talent for pleasing the crowd. Thus his initial assertion that lobbyists “won’t work in my White House”. Then, possibly after being told by his campaign managers that special interests are more influential than the rest of the country, he tweaked his vow slightly whereby lobbyists “are not going to dominate my White House.” Although his pledge changed its substance almost entirely, he was able to receive victory in Iowa.

For now, analysts can extract temporary comfort from the prevailing interpretation of the Iowa caucuses’ results. Obama was elected by the Democratic caucuses with 37 per cent because he was the only nominee that managed to present a truly new message — that he and only he can advocate real “change”. As for former Arkansas governor, Republican Mike Huckabee, he was the best possible candidate to represent the Republican voters’ conservative concerns. The former Baptist pastor is the rising star of the Christian evangelicals who boast 40 million followers, all tied by an outrageous message of doomsday.

Rev Stan Moody of the Christian Policy Institute, writes, “Huckabee is a Rapturist” in reference to the mid-19th Century interpretation of biblical text which culminated in 1909 as the Scofield Desk Reference Bible. This envisions — and not metaphorically — a Greater Israel as a precondition to the return of Christ, who, with the true Christians, will defeat Satanic forces, convert 144,000 Jews and exterminate the rest. It has no Harry Potter twists, but it puts Hollywood horror movies to shame. The actual concern is that this group has cultivated an alliance with the Israeli government since the late 1970s and is a major powerbroker in US foreign policy in the Middle East.

In her article, which appeared in The Jerusalem Post on 3 January, Hilary Leila Krieger reported from Iowa that Huckabee “has also been staunchly supportive of Israel, writing in Foreign Affairs that, ‘I will not waver in standing by our ally Israel.’ It is a country he has visited several times, leading groups there as well as taking his family.”

According to the same article, “Huckabee has drawn on his experience in the Holy Land in making his pitch to voters, which has especially resonated with evangelicals.”

With the notable exceptions of Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Dennis Kucinich, most visible presidential candidates were eager to compromise the interest of their country to guarantee that of Israel’s. Clinton and Obama exemplify this. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) wrote, “Obama has always enjoyed strong Jewish support since entering state politics in Illinois in 1996, although some in the pro-Israel establishment are wary of his calls to negotiate with rogue states such as Syria and Iran.” JTA, of course, nonchalantly substitute the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jewish’, but that’s another story.

While supporting Israel, right or wrong, is business as usual for US politicians, Huckabee’s advent — described as the “second coming” of Ronald Reagan by a producer at an Iowa TV station, is the truly alarming trend. He cannot simply be dismissed as a lunatic Armageddonist who thinks that he can win an election; he actually captured the Republican endorsement in Iowa.

Huckabee knows well how to carry the momentum to the next destination — he needs to keep up the religious fervour, as narrow-minded and irrational as it may be. We are told that this is what voters are expecting. To win, like a good filmmaker, Huckabee must deliver.

Life can indeed resemble the movies, but in the case of US elections the movie has become so familiar and predictable that it’s no longer even entertaining.

WASHINGTON (Jan. 13) – Blackwater Worldwide repaired and repainted its trucks immediately after a deadly September shooting in Baghdad, making it difficult to determine whether enemy gunfire provoked the attack, according to people familiar with the government’s investigation of the incident.

Damage to the vehicles in the convoy has been held up by Blackwater as proof that its security guards were defending themselves against an insurgent ambush when they fired into a busy intersection, leaving 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

U.S. military investigators initially found “no enemy activity involved” and the Iraqi government concluded the shootings were unprovoked.

The repairs essentially destroyed evidence that Justice Department investigators hoped to examine in a criminal case that has drawn worldwide attention. The Sept. 16 shooting has strained U.S. relations with the Iraqi government, which wants Blackwater expelled from the country. It also has become a flash point in the debate over whether contractors are immune from legal consequences for their actions in a war zone.

Blackwater’s four armored vehicles were repaired or repainted within days of the shooting, and before FBI teams went to Baghdad to collect evidence, people close to the case said. The work included repairs to a damaged radiator that Blackwater says is central to its defense.

The damage and subsequent repairs were described to The Associated Press by five people familiar with the case who discussed it in separate interviews over the past month. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

The repair work creates a hurdle for prosecutors as they consider building a case against any of the 19 guards in the Sept. 16 convoy. It also makes it harder for Blackwater to prove its innocence as it faces a grand jury investigation and multiple lawsuits over the shooting. The company is the target, too, of an unrelated investigation into whether its contractors smuggled weapons into Iraq.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said any repairs “would have been done at the government’s direction.” Blackwater’s contract with the State Department requires that the company maintain its vehicles and keep them on the road.

The State Department would not comment on whether it ordered the repairs to the vehicles involved in the shooting.

Blackwater’s chief executive, Erik Prince, has pointed to the damaged trucks to counter accusations that his contractors acted improperly.

In interviews this fall, he said three of Blackwater’s armored vehicles were struck by gunfire and that the radiator from one was “shot out and disabled” during the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. An early two-page State Department report supports Prince’s statements. The report noted the Blackwater command vehicle was “disabled during the attack” and had to be towed.

Prince has indicated he expects the FBI investigation to clear his company. Yet people close to the case say the vehicles and radiator alone probably will not be enough to do that because repairing the trucks made it difficult for investigators to say whether the convoy was fired on – or not.

As for the radiator, investigators have verified that it was damaged. But it, too, was repaired before the FBI arrived two weeks after the shooting.

No bullets were found inside the radiator to prove it had been shot, as opposed to being broken during routine use. That makes it hard for scientists to say for certain what caused the damage or when, according to those close to the case.

The preliminary State Department report noted “superficial damage” to the vehicles; and photographs exist showing bullet damage. People who have seen the photos said there are no time stamps or other indications of when and where that damage occurred.

One photo, obtained and broadcast by CBS News, bore no notations indicating when it was taken or even if the vehicle pictured was involved in the shooting.

The evidence gaps will force investigators to rely more heavily on testimony and other statements from witnesses. But even those efforts have been hampered by a State Department deal that gave Blackwater guards limited immunity for their statements following the incident. As a result, the Justice Department cannot use those interviews in its criminal investigation.

There were 19 security guards at the scene. Investigators believe only a few fired their weapons. Investigators are pushing ahead with the search for additional evidence and so far are focusing on as many four guards who could face criminal charges.

Over the past two months, prosecutors have brought several guards before a Washington grand jury to describe their recollection of the shooting. According to the initial State Department report, the shooting occurred as the Blackwater convoy was responding to a car bombing about a mile outside the U.S.-protected Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi government and several embassies.

James Sweeney, a lawyer representing several guards, would not discuss the forensic gaps or whether the grand jury investigation is helping authorities bridge them. He said Blackwater guards are patriots, not aggressors.

“They are good, solid intelligent Americans. They’re good people,” Sweeney said. “They’re protecting U.S. diplomats.”

North Carolina-based Blackwater is the largest private security company protecting U.S. officials in Iraq. It has been paid more than $1 billion from federal contracts since 2001. Despite criticism, Blackwater notes that no official under its protection has been killed or seriously injured.

Blackwater also strongly denies wrongdoing in a weapons smuggling investigation by federal officials in North Carolina. Two former employees, who prosecutors say are aiding the investigation, were sentenced to probation Thursday on gunrunning charges.

Blackwater and other contractors operate in a legal gray area. They are immune from prosecution in Iraqi courts. If the Justice Department wants to bring criminal charges such as assault, manslaughter or murder in a U.S. court, prosecutors would have to do so under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act.

That would require the government to show that State Department contractors were “supporting the mission of the Department of Defense overseas.” Defense lawyers are expected to argue that guarding diplomats was a purely State Department function, one independent from the Pentagon.

The Justice Department has said it could be some time before it decides whether it will bring charges in the case.

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper soon reported: “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.”

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

With a wave of negative signs gathering force, economists, policy makers and investors are debating just how much the economy could be damaged in 2008. Huge and complex, the American economy has in recent years been aided by a global web of finance so elaborate that no one seems capable of fully comprehending it. That makes it all but impossible to predict how much the economy can be expected to fall before it stabilizes.

The answer could be a defining factor in the outcome of the fiercely contested presidential election. Not long ago, the race centered on the war in Iraq.

But now, as candidates fan out across the country, visiting places as varied as the factory towns of Michigan and streets lined with unsold condominiums in Las Vegas, voters are increasingly demanding that they focus on the best way to keep the economy from slipping off the tracks.

The measures now being debated in Washington and on the campaign trail — tax rebates, added help for the unemployed and those facing sharply higher heating bills and, most immediately, a move by the Federal Reserve to further cut interest rates — could certainly moderate the severity of a downturn. Democrats and the Bush administration are considering a package of such measures that could reach $100 billion.

But the forces menacing the economy, like the unraveling of the real estate market and high oil prices, are too entrenched to be swiftly dispatched by government largess or cheaper credit, some economists say.

“The question is not whether we will have a recession, but how deep and prolonged it will be,” said David Rosenberg, the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch. “Even if the Fed’s moves are going to work, it will not show up until the later part of 2008 or 2009.”

In the view of many analysts, the economy is now in a downward spiral, with each piece of negative news setting off the next. Falling housing prices have eroded the ability of homeowners to borrow against their property, threatening their ability to spend freely. Concerns about tightening consumer spending have prompted businesses to slow hiring, limiting wage increases and in turn applying the brakes anew to consumer spending.

Not everyone is convinced that the American economy is headed for a recession, defined as six months of economic contraction. The economy often serves up indications of distress that later turn out to be false warnings.

But some economists think a recession may have begun in December. In the last two weeks, there have been signs that a substantial downturn may already be unfolding. The Labor Department reported a sharp slowdown in job creation in December. Retailers said that sales last month were extremely disappointing, capping the worst gain for a holiday season in five years. A widely watched index showed manufacturing slowing, despite a weak American dollar that has encouraged growth in exports.

The construction of new homes has already fallen by some 40 percent since the peak in 2006. The sales of new homes have fallen even faster, suggesting that a large oversupply of places to live will continue to drag down prices.

Home prices have dropped by about 7 percent since the peak in 2006, but some experts suggest they could fall by another 15 to 20 percent before hitting bottom.

“There is still a long way to go,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University and chairman of the research firm RGE Monitor.

Mr. Roubini has long predicted the real estate downturn would cause a severe recession. He envisions foreclosures accelerating this year, and banks counting fresh losses. That could make them less able to lend and further slow economic activity, not just in the United States but around the world.

“We’re facing the risk of a systemic financial crisis,” Mr. Roubini said. “It’s not just subprime mortgages. The same kind of reckless lending has been occurring throughout the financial system. And it’s not only mortgages: Now it’s credit cards and auto loans, where we see problems increasing. The toxic junk is popping up everywhere.”

Banks, including commercial banks and investment banks, have so far acknowledged losses of some $100 billion, yet anxiety persists that more large write-offs are coming.

“Firms will go to great lengths to hide or delay reporting losses,” said Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics. “What we know now therefore might only be the tip of the iceberg.”

In a speech on Thursday, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, zeroed in on the nervousness of bankers as a prime factor slowing the economy, even as the Fed tries to stimulate it with cheaper credit.

“Developments have prompted banks to become protective of their liquidity and balance sheet capacity and thus to become less willing to provide funding to other market participants,” he said. His comments were widely construed as an assurance that the Fed would soon cut rates again. The Fed already dropped rates three times during the last four months of 2007.

Wall Street has clamored for the Fed to keep lowering rates, cognizant that cheaper credit is generally good not just for encouraging borrowing and spending but also for corporate profits.

But some economists fear that lower rates will simply provide a short-lived boost at the expense of the economy’s longer-term health: Cheap money encourages foolish investments, they say, which is precisely how Americans came to experience the evaporation of wealth in the Internet era, followed by housing prices rising beyond any reasonable connection to incomes.

“This appears to be a panic on the part of the Fed,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm. “The housing bubble was a reaction from the effort to protect us from the collapse of the tech bubble. What’s the next bubble going to be as a consequence of trying to protect us against this?”

Mr. Darda asserts that the economy would be fine if left to its own devices, maintaining that the job market is healthier than most economists think. He contends that the December jobs report is likely to be revised to show that far more jobs were created than the 18,000 reported by the Labor Department.

“That could be important in terms of reversing the direction,” Mr. Darda said. “We need to see evidence that the labor market isn’t falling apart. That’s critical.”

But most economists seem convinced that the economy has slowed significantly, and say it is the severity of a downturn that is in doubt, not the existence of one.

“If we have a recession with a modest consumer retrenchment, and the rest of the world holds up, this could be three quarters of disappointment,” said Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG. “The risk is a more dramatic decline for the consumer.”

There is little doubt that the Fed will lower its benchmark rate later this month, making it cheaper for banks to lend money to one another. But there is more doubt whether Washington can quickly agree on fiscal policy moves — that is, raising spending or cutting taxes — in an election year in which the White House and Congress are controlled by different parties.

A recession could pack enormous political consequences. Over the last century, the economy has been in a recession four times in the early part of a presidential election year, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. In each of those years — 1920, 1932, 1960 and 1980 — the party of the incumbent president lost the election.

Much discussed now in Washington and on the campaign trail is a potential rebate for taxpayers, similar to one that seemed to lubricate spending during the last recession six years ago. But worries remain over whether such a move could exacerbate inflation, and some doubt that the benefits would be felt rapidly enough to justify the risks.

While tax rebates can encourage spending and generate jobs, Mr. Roubini said, the government cannot afford to unleash the significant amounts — $300 billion or $400 billion — that he believes would be required to ensure a substantial rebound in economic growth.

“Whatever they’re going to do,” he said, “it’s going to be cosmetic.”

The media are abuzz over the 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that saw so much change in this country. But one of the most extraordinary of those changes has been almost completely forgotten: 1968 was the first year in the history of the United States that not a single prisoner was executed. Today, we’re getting close to matching that milestone.

Forty years ago, the death penalty was dying off. With the injustices highlighted by the civil- rights movement prominent in the public consciousness, polls found that more Americans opposed capital punishment than supported it. Several states had banned the practice starting in the early 1960s, and prominent leaders, from then-presidential candidate Robert Kennedy to local politicians, were denouncing it. Even the U.S. attorney general called for its abolition. In a 1968 ruling, a Supreme Court justice dismissed death penalty advocates as a “distinct and dwindling minority.” That year, the number of executions hit zero. Finally, in 1972, the Supreme Court effectively banned executions.

But just a few years later, the nation began an astonishing about-face. The Supreme Court reopened the door to capital punishment in 1976, launching an era in which the United States didn’t just bring back the death penalty, it feverishly embraced it. By the 1990s, a record majority of Americans favored capital punishment. Opposing it had become political suicide for any major candidate. Courts were handing down hundreds of death sentences every year, and dozens of new crimes were being made capital offenses in state after state. By the start of the millennium, thousands of men and women were languishing on death row, and the number of executions shot up to nearly 100 a year.

What happened? By the mid-1970s, much of middle America was deeply uneasy about how the fabric of society seemed to be unraveling. Drug use and crime were rising; minorities, women and homosexuals were demanding power and respect. And the mighty United States was humiliated, first in Vietnam and later by Iranian hostage-takers.

In this milieu, politicians learned that crime could pay – for them. From federal candidates to county sheriffs, would-be officeholders began vying to out-tough each other on law-and-order issues. One result was the extension of the death penalty to dozens of new crimes.

Today the nation is again losing its enthusiasm for capital punishment. Executions are effectively on hold until the Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection is unconstitutionally inhumane. If it rules that it is, states can, of course, find some other way to end convicts’ lives. But Americans are increasingly queasy about doing so, no matter how it’s done.

Although about two-thirds of all Americans still support capital punishment in principle, that number is considerably lower than what it was just five years ago. In practice, we’re ever more reluctant to impose it. That’s largely because of the more than 100 men and women who have been freed from death row in recent years, thanks to DNA testing and other advances. That shocking proof of the system’s fallibility also has made juries, judges, prosecutors and politicians much more wary about pushing for the ultimate punishment. In 1996, courts handed down 317 death sentences; last year, that number plummeted to 110, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. And in December, New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty. At least two other states are considering doing likewise.

According to Amnesty International, 133 countries have abolished the death penalty. And the United Nations has voted for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment.

As far back as the 1960s, almost every industrialized nation had abandoned the death penalty as a barbaric anachronism. The United States in 1968 was on track to do the same – not because the Supreme Court forced it on us, but because we as a nation had decided it was a bad idea. That’s something worth remembering in this new year.

Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in New Hampshire guarantees a longer, more competitive Democratic primary season. It’s like money in the bank for broadcasters, as the first billion-dollar presidential campaign continues.

While the world’s oldest democracy, the United States, spends trillions of dollars claiming to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq (through the barrel of a gun), what have we got here? A process driven by major donors shoveling huge sums of cash into the troughs of television broadcasters, who are holding the electoral process hostage through their control of the public airwaves. The same broadcasters arbitrarily exclude viable candidates from their so-called debates, elevating themselves to kingmaker.

According to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, a group that tracks political advertising, overall spending by the presidential candidates in Iowa topped $50 million. In 2004, spending was closer to $9 million. The group reported that spending on all campaign and issue ads, for all current races (presidential and others) in the U.S., reached $715 million by the end of 2007. WMUR, New Hampshire’s only statewide commercial television channel, raked in millions of dollars from political advertising this primary season. WMUR’s headquarters is dubbed “The House That Forbes Built,” after Steve Forbes spent so much on ads in his 1996 presidential run.

With the new compressed, “front-loaded” primary schedule, with more and more states moving their primary dates closer to those first-in-nation events in Iowa and New Hampshire, the need for money is extreme. Feb. 5, dubbed “Super-Duper Tuesday,” will see primaries in more than 20 states, including huge media “markets” like New York, Illinois and California. Barack Obama, Clinton and John Edwards will have to continue to raise huge sums, only to hand most of it over to broadcasters, who, through their control of the public airwaves, dole out access to the electorate.

One way Fox News/News Corp. recently tried to influence the process was to exclude Ron Paul from a Republican candidate forum in New Hampshire, two days before that state’s first-in-the-nation primary. Paul was the most successful fundraiser among Republican candidates in the fourth quarter of 2007; he decisively beat Rudy Giuliani in the Iowa caucus, with 10 percent of the vote versus Giuliani’s 4 percent. Fox nixed Paul from the debate, while Giuliani was welcomed. The New Hampshire Republican Party pulled its support from the debate. Party chair Fergus Cullen said: “The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary serves a national purpose by giving all candidates an equal opportunity on a level playing field. Lesser-known, lesser-funded underdogs have a fighting chance to establish themselves as national figures. [W]e believe all recognized major candidates should have an equal opportunity to participate in pre-primary debates and forums.”

Paul appeared on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” (which has restarted production despite the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, which is keeping Democratic candidates away from the strikebreaking network shows). Leno asked him how he was responding to Fox’s banning him: “I realized that they really had some property rights ability there, and I wasn’t going to crash the party. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I ought to sue them.’ I’ve decided what to sue them over, and that is for fraud, because of this ‘fair and balanced’ idea.”

While threatening to sue the network for its fraudulent claim of being “Fair and Balanced” (a ludicrous motto for Fox), Paul neglects the key point: The airwaves are not the private property of Fox. Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. profit from their use of the public airwaves, which comes with the responsibility to serve the public interest. If the electoral process itself, the nuts and bolts of democracy, does not rate as a public interest, what does?

ABC News pulled the same stunt on Dennis Kucinich, barring him from the debate it sponsored on Sunday night. Kucinich filed an emergency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, saying, “ABC should not be the first primary.” He noted that ABC “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Co., whose executives have contributed heavily to … Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, former Sen. John Edwards and Gov. Bill Richardson.” ABC limited the debate to those four by requiring participants to place at least fourth in the Iowa caucus to qualify. But the Kucinich campaign said it “bypassed the Iowa caucuses,” preferring to focus resources on New Hampshire, then got shut out of the debate. Kucinich’s key points, getting out of Iraq and promoting single-payer health care, went virtually unheard in New Hampshire.

The majority of the money that candidates are forced to raise is for TV ads. They are running to be the nation’s top public servant. The networks should provide the airtime as a free public service. The airwaves belong to the public; they are a national treasure. They should be used to enrich our electoral process. Instead, they are exploited by highly profitable TV networks, forcing the candidates to rely on monied interests. This vicious cycle must be broken.

Denis Moynihan assisted on this column.

The founders of the United States took the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the concepts of free speech and freedom of conscience very seriously.

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech,” said Benjamin Franklin.

“Information is the currency of democracy,” intoned Thomas Jefferson — one of countless Jefferson odes to the central importance of ideas and free transmission of information in fostering a working democracy.

But could they possibly have imagined the twisted purposes to which the First Amendment is put today?

Two crucial developments in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence — the grant of Bill of Rights protections to corporations, and the extension of First Amendment protections to commercial speech — have enabled corporations to invoke the First Amendment to defend their right to hawk goods, so long as they are legal, by almost any means short of outright lying or clear deception.

Now corporations are suggesting the First Amendment should effectively immunize them from government-imposed rules related to the simple commercial exchange of information.

This new expansion of the First Amendment to block broad public regulatory powers emerges from efforts in New England to control one of the most insidious pharmaceutical marketing practices.

Anyone who watches television in the United States, or reads magazines, is familiar with drug company advertisements to consumers. But these represent a relatively small fraction of industry marketing expenditures.

Drug companies devote much more money, and time, to influencing those with the power to prescribe medicines — as much as $34 billion in the United States, more than eight times what is spent on direct-to-consumer marketing.

The most important element of the marketing onslaught directed at doctors is “detailing” — the activities of the sales representatives who visit doctors constantly, and provide free lunches, free pens, free charts and other free goodies (including, very importantly, free samples). The average primary care physician sees drug detailers more than five times a day.

When a sales rep walks into a doctors office, he or she knows a lot about that doctor — including exactly what medicines the doctor prescribes, and in what quantities. How can this be?

Pharmaceutical companies purchase the information from data-mining companies, the largest of which is IMS Health. Pharmacies track what drug is sold to each customer. IMS buys the data from the pharmacies, deletes all patient names, combines it with data that enables the identification of prescribers for each prescription, and aggregates the information.

Then, when the drug company representatives cheerfully bound in to a doctor’s office, they know exactly what the doctor is prescribing. They know if the doctor prescribes a lot of medicine or a little (drug company reps rate the doctors on a scale of 1-10, or A-F), and whether they go for the rep’s company’s product or a competitor’s or a generic. They know where to focus their efforts, and how to frame their sales pitches.

And, as the New York Times explained, quoting an e-mail message from a pharmaceutical executive to company salespeople, they use the data to “hold [doctors] accountable for all the time, samples, lunches, dinners, programs and past preceptorships that you have paid for and get the business!” The sales reps obviously do not have punitive power over the doctors, but they use the prescribing information to exploit and manipulate the social ties built on the giving relationship.

Neither doctors nor patients consent to this use of prescribing data, and only a tiny few even know about it.

New Hampshire decided to ban this use of the data in 2006. Vermont and Maine followed with similar laws.

IMS sued to block implementation of the laws, and won at the U.S. district court level. Judges agreed with IMS that the New Hampshire and Maine laws violate the company’s claimed First Amendment rights.

The New Hampshire law permits IMS and other data miners to continue to collect prescription data, but they can’t use individualized data — information about specific doctors’ prescribing practices — for commercial purposes.

The law is a “speech restriction because it limits both the use and disclosure of prescriber-identifiable data for commercial purposes,” District Judge Paul Barbadoro found in the New Hampshire case.

This was a misguided determination, challenged by the State of New Hampshire in an appeal argued before the First Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday. Leave aside the merits of providing First Amendment protections to corporations, or to commercial speech. Nothing about the New Hampshire law impinges on the expressive values that the First Amendment is intended to protect.

Contends Sean Flynn, the lead attorney for a coalition of public interest organizations supporting the New Hampshire law, “This case is not about speech, it is about industry surveillance of the doctor-patient relationship. New Hampshire acted through its data-mining law to safeguard that relationship, and the public health, by protecting it from industry surveillance and manipulation.”

Flynn says that if the district court’s ruling is upheld, and the principle of commercial speech protections is extended to cover any commercial exchange of text or data, then a host of existing laws are vulnerable to constitutional challenge. These include laws to protect consumer privacy and to mandate disclosure of financial information related to securities transactions.

It is very hard to defend government regulations determined to restrict commercial speech. Under Supreme Court rulings, judges must assess whether a commercial speech restriction advances a substantial governmental interest, directly advances the interest and is no more limiting of speech than necessary. In a case like New Hampshire’s pharmaceutical data-mining restrictions, the test effectively requires the judge to closely scrutinize a government regulation and decide if it is both a good idea, and the best possible and least speech-restrictive way of achieving a desired ends. It gives the judge unwarranted authority — comparable, as former Justice Rehnquist noted, to the discredited turn-of-the-20th-century Lochner authority to strike down economic regulations — and makes it very hard to uphold a challenged regulation.

In applying the test, Judge Barbadoro knocked down the New Hampshire law on numerous grounds. There was no legitimate privacy interest involved, he found, especially since there is no evidence of drug sales reps harassing doctors. Pharmaceutical detailing may result in more brand-name and fewer generic drugs being prescribed, at greater expense, but there is no evidence that prescriber data “is being used to propagate false or misleading marketing messages.” And, he found, there are other ways the State could aim to curb drug company gifts, counter detailers’ messages and educate doctors, and aim to promote greater use of generic drugs.

Just to list the judge’s findings is to show how much inappropriate power the commercial speech test confers on judges in a case like this.

Will the appeals court agree with Judge Barbadoro? We’ll know in a few months.

Could Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries have imagined the First Amendment being deployed for such purposes?

The world has obviously changed in the last 200-plus years, and Jefferson could not have envisioned even the existence of the modern pharmaceutical industry. But he did understand the threat that corporations posed to a working democracy.

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” he wrote.

The notorious prison is six years old today. But despite calls from across the US political spectrum, it doesn’t look likely to close soon

On January 11 2008 the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay enters the seventh year since the first men captured during the “war on terror” were brought there shackled, hooded, masked and ear-muffed.

Much has happened over the past few years that should have sufficed in bringing about the demise and closure of the world’s most notorious prison: The 2004 US supreme court ruling in Rasul (2004) passed in favour of the right of detainees to apply for habeas corpus; the US supreme court ruling in Hamdan (2006) stating President Bush did not have the authority to set up military commissions because it violated the uniform code of military justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva conventions.

Also, last year, in the cases of Salim Hamdan (allegedly Osama bin Laden’s driver) and Omar Khadr (a Canadian citizen detained since the age of 15), all charges were dismissed because they had only been classified as “enemy combatants” and not “unlawful enemy combatants”. Despite all of these rulings by the highest court in the land both men – and about 275 others – remain in custody without charge or trial.

Just before the advent of 2008, Guantánamo’s most well-known prisoner, David Hicks, was finally freed in his native Australia. In May 2007, Hicks entered a plea bargain and became the first prisoner to be convicted in Guantánamo. He was given a custodial sentence of only nine months – which he served out in his home town, Adelaide.

In this country, four British residents, on whose behalf the Blair administration had refused to intervene, were finally reunited with their families in this country last year. The struggle for two others, Binyam Mohammed and Ahmed Belbacha, continues.

Nearly 500 men have been released from Guantánamo since it was opened in 2002. This is quite surprising considering all of them, including me, were deemed by the US administration as the “worst of the worst”. Even more surprising is the fact that at least two of them, released several years ago, included the former Taliban foreign minister and spokesman.

Of the Saudi citizens, who once outnumbered all other nationalities in the camp, only a handful remains. They include a former UK resident, Shaker Aamer, whose return to Saudi Arabia his British wife and children eagerly await.

During 2006 and last year, five other men were freed from Guantánamo, though by more unconventional means. Four of them allegedly committed suicide – though no post-mortem reports have ever been made public – and, less than a fortnight ago, an Afghan prisoner became the first to die of “natural causes”. The bodies were all returned home.

If all of the above is not enough to bring about the end for Guantánamo then perhaps we need to hear what some the most influential people in the US have said about it:

The former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said: “… if it were up to me I would close Guantánamo not tomorrow but this afternoon” and “… I would get rid of Guantánamo and the military commission system.”

The former US president, Jimmy Carter, said: “… our government needs to close down Guantánamo and the two dozen other secret detention facilities …”

The former US president, Bill Clinton, said: “… [Guantánamo should be] closed down or cleaned up…”

Even the US president, GW Bush, said: “I would like to close the camp [Guantánamo]…”

The US senator, Barack Obama, said: “While we’re at it … we’re going to close Guantánamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus … We’re going to lead by example, by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.”

Senator Hilary Clinton said: “Guantánamo has become associated in the eyes of the world with a discredited administration policy of abuse, secrecy, and contempt for the rule of law. Rather than keeping us more secure, keeping Guantánamo open is harming our national interests.”

Senator John McCain said: “Guantánamo has become a symbol around the world that is not good … we should try them or release them”.

The latter three have just contested elections for state primaries and will soon be fighting to assume the presidency of the US. This will come after the long overdue departure of Bush later this year. Guantánamo will probably not be closed before that happens, but as long as it remains open there will be people calling unequivocally for it to close.

Moazzam Begg is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and spokesman for Cageprisoners.

The Underground Press, created to reflect and shape the withdrawn life style of hippies and dropouts, has taken a sharp turn toward radical politics.

Until recently, the formula for a successful underground paper was sex, drugs, rock music, Oriental religion and the “San Francisco look” in psychedelic art.

Now this material Is yielding to coverage of student uprisings, the peace movement, guerilla activities, draft resistance and muckraking attacks on the political and social Establishment.

The disruption in June by [some] people of a television panel discussion on the underground press, lavishly covered in underground papers, is regarded by many as symbolic of the shift toward confrontation. During the incident, which took place at the studios of Channel 13 while the “Newsfront” program was on the air, the invaders milled about in front of the camera, shouted and cursed the “Establishment media.”

“We’re not withdrawing,” said one underground editor,speaking of the trend, “we’re overturning.”

There are perhaps 150 underground papers, almost all of them less than three years old and most of them published under shaky financial conditions in large cities or college towns.

By the standards of traditional journalism, much of the underground writing is freewheeling, lurid, superficial and sometimes indecipherable.

However, much of it is imaginative and impassioned coverage of events sometimes slighted by established media.

Range of the Genre

The underground journals range from the brash young political papers, like The Great Speckled Bird of Atlanta, to the solid affluence of The Los Angeles Free Press, an established part of that city’s cultural scene; from the transcendental theory of Avatar to the “mind-blowing” visual effects and kinky sex ads of The East Village Other.

But the general trend is toward radical politics. The Free Press and Avatar (now published in separate Boston and New York editions) have stepped up political coverage. The Oracle of San Francisco, perhaps the most influential of the papers promoting salvation through mysticism and drugs, has suspended publication.

Many other papers that grew out of the LSD and Hippie culture, such as The East Village Other, are struggling for a new identity.

“The drug culture is dead,” said Jeff Shero, editor of The Rat, which bills Itself as “New York’s muckraking subterranean newspaper.”

“It’s now impossible to believe in any kind of salvation from drugs. Kids get drafted or hit by cops on real or phony drug raids. The outside world keeps barging through your door and you’ve got to confront it.”

Like many editors, Max Schorr of The Berkeley Barb believes that police “harassment” is the largest single factor in politicizing the alienated audience for underground papers.

“What the Germans used to call ‘the inner exile’ is over,”‘he said. “Whether your friends and neighbors are getting hit on the head by police, running around in despair, you’re involved whether you want to be or not. People are finding that they can’t hide from society as they thought they could.

For many, prolonged living in a hippie area has come to mean danger, poverty, overcrowding, police raids and a slow brutalizing of the spirit.

“The concept of flower people in America today is absurd,” said Peter Leagieri, publisher of The East Village Other.

Much of this disenchantment is now being channeled into political radicalism by the war in Vietnam, pressures from the draft and the recent student revolts at Columbia and the Sorbonne.

‘Lenny Bruce in Print’

“The repressive aspects of society are just being seen more and more clearly,” according to Paul Krassner, whose irreverent pre-underground journal. The Realist, has shifted from black humor (“It was Lenny Bruce In print,” Mr. Krassner said) to equally antic but more political coverage.

Since the first of the year, the few older political papers, such as The Barb and The San Francisco Free Press, have been joined by some 30 new radical underground papers, most of them heavily influenced by the leftist Students for a Democratic Society. Many of them, like S. D. S., consider American society hopelessly corrupt and advocate disruption of “the system.”

Traditional coverage is politicized, not eliminated. The Paper, at Michigan State, has turned sports coverage of the university/ football team into a sociological indictment of America. In New York, The Rat covers rock music as “the language of the revolution.”

“The point isn’t to talk to people who are already radical,” said The Rat’s Mr. Shero, a member and former vice president of S.D.S. “We use the rock section, or an occasional nude on the cov«r, as a way of opening us up to people who are 17 and 18 and thinking about their own problems, not politics.”

Columbia and Berkeley

Recently, The Rat published an exclusive story on a Mexican guerrilla band, first-person accounts and exclusive pictures of the Columbia turmoil, stories on the violence of the June demonstrations in Berkeley, Calif, (“the first off-campus white rebellion America has known in recent times”), and a “guide to survival” for demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

In general, the underground papers keep a sharp watch for misconduct by the police (“psychopaths in blue”), anything dealing with Ernesto Che Guevara (“the saint who climbed mountains”), unflattering photographs of President Johnson (commonly touched up with swastikas) and for any evidence, however tenuous, that the United States is run by an Interlocking directorate of the selfish and complacent.

The Black Panther party gets heavy coverage, but otherwise race is not usually a priority issue. (“Most of our readers have been through that,” said Mr. Shero.) Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, heroes when drugs and religion reached their peak in the underground press, are now rarely mentioned.

Comics More Political

There are rambling personal essays laced with profanity and zany comic strips, both of which are becoming more and more political. “The San Francisco look – basically the curved line of art nouveau in psychedelic color – seems to be yielding to “the New York look” (“The New York look creates tension.” one editor said. “It’s the perfect art for the politics of confrontation.”)

News coverage is consciously subjective and onesided; (“A growing revolt against the selfish and reactionary American Medical Association came to a head here began a typical recent article in Open City, a Los Angeles paper.)

The theory is that truth is rooted in personal experience, and that the standard news media, by insisting on impartial and detached coverage, omit and distort the underlying reality of crucial news events. (In shorter form, the argument goes that no newspaper is objective – the underground papers are just the only ones acknowledging it.)

“Objectivity is a farce,” said Thorne Dreyer of Liberation News Services, which serves many of the underground papers. Mr. Shero added: “We made our biases clear. That frees our writers to talk about their guts.”

The papers are characteristically casual about checking facts before publication. One editor, who declined to be identified, when asked about a widely reprinted story about riots and murder at a Texas military base (actually no one was killed) replied: “Well, the straight press didn’t print anything, and we printed too much. It all balances out in the end.”

Another concern is that the goal of building a revolutionary movement can be endangered by turning down or questioning stories sent in by allies.

“We often print something for someone In the ‘family,'” said Daniel McCauslin of Liberation News. eration News. “If you get someone sending you stuff from the Midwest, you just have to trust him. We’re not held together by massive objectivity, but by trust.”

This same trust led to the Underground Press Service, an agreement among some 60 underground editors to reprint from one another’s newspapers without special permission, attribution or rechecking.

The underground papers are not a quality press,” Thomas Pepper, a former reporter and graduate student wrote recently in The Nation, “because they pander to their readers with a dexterity befitting the Establishment papers they criticize so bitterly. [They] offer nothing more than a stylized theory of protest.”

Nevertheless, he adds, they “have awakened virtually all concerned to a real deficiency in American newspaper journalism … the fact that regular metropolitan dailies do not communicate with subcultures.”

Paul Williams, 20-year-old Harvard dropout and publisher of Crawdaddy, the successful and highly regarded magazine of rock music, complains that the underground press generally cover the same subject matter as Look magazine.

“Very few are actually doing much work or original thinking, and the copy is getting sloppier,” he said. “Many start with enthusiasm and are trapped by business — they owe people money and pretty soon they’re on a treadmill, keeping the papers going by putting out what the readers are already interested in. There’s no longer much difference between the underground and the regular press.”

For most papers, financial pressures are heavy. Some editors who have lost their second-class mailing permits, usually for technical violations of the postal code, say they could be put out of business by a rapid subscription raise.

Eight out of ten papers would fail if a few phonograph record companies stopped advertising, according to John Walrus, business manager of The Seed ;in Chicago. His own paper, he said, receives $1,000 of its $1,400 in weekly advertising from record ads.

In talking about money problems and shifting reader tastes, an underground publisher can sound remarkably like an Establishment publisher. The East Village Other’s Mr. Leggieri, who said it costs $18,000 a month to publish (“we’re simply not geared to being an underground paper anymore”) thinks that EVO must move away from the psychedelic scene, but rejects a switch toward radical politics.

“The times are changing and we have to change too, but we don’t believe politics can lead to anything beneficial to mankind,” he said. “This is a political year, but when it’s over the political papers will be gone and we’ll still be here.” Mr. Leggieri said his astrologer, whom he consults regularly, reported that EVO’s new approach will begin to take shape this month.

The advantage of the political papers is that they know exactly what their goal is, and a good deal of the credit for their rise is being assigned to Liberation News Service. Liberation News was founded in Washington, in 1967 by Ray Mungo (Boston University, ’67) and Marshall Bloom (Amherst, ’66), both radical editors of their college papers. It provides inexpensive political coverage ($15 a month for two or three weekly packets) to 400 outlets, including 100 underground papers, and has reportedly persuaded many “drug culture” papers to emphasize politics.

C.B.S. a Subscriber

The agency has offered long reports from Hanoi, detailed round-ups of antidraft activities and a series on the latest chemical weapons stockpiled by the Pentagon. The Columbia Broadcasting System and Look magazine are among the agency’s subscribers, and Doubleday has commissioned a book from Liberation News on the Columbia dispute.

Its basic belief is that a “new journalism” is taking shape in America, totally outside the province of established journalism, and that radicals are leading the movement. It also assumes that the established media are incapable of printing the truth about anything important.

“The media is the enemy,” Mr. Mungo said. “I’d much rather put The Times out of business than the New York City police. It does much more damage.”

Many underground editors who have come to rely heavily on Liberation News are apprehensive that it may go out of business. In a bitter dispute last month, the agency split into two factions, both of which are attempting to continue publication as the one and only Liberation News Service.

Mr. Mungo, Mr. Bloom and several other staffers are publishing from a farm in Montague, Mass. Thirteen other staff members are publishing from the Liberation News offices at 160 Claremont Avenue in New York. They moved there from Washington last spring.

Mr. Bloom suggested that the 13 staffers were too doctrinaire, narrow and prone to jargon-ridden prose. He in turn was accused of being authoritarian and insufficiently militant.

Liberation News and the underground press are part of a loose alliance sometimes referred to as “the alternative media.” It includes high school and college papers (over 80 are served by Liberation (News), some prison and military papers, a string of 11 radical Spanish-language papers known as the Chicano press, a few “underground” TV and radio stations, and sympathetic “straight” journals such as Ramparts and The Village Voice.

This alliance is pugnaciously confident that it represents the wave of the future.

“A working class hero is something to be” – John Lennon

Dear John,

What do you think about a “Working Class Hero” remix? Maybe change the chorus a bit. “A working class hero was something to be…”

In the years before your death, compassionate politics focused on the poor and the working class. The politics of today, at least the “compassionate conservative” variety, has cut-and-run from the “War on Poverty,” proclaiming the half-hearted effort a failure. In the new millennium, the “War on the Middle Class” is all the rage.

Oddly enough, John, serious people — mostly Art Laffer lovin,’ Ron Paul Republicans — still argue we live in a “classless society,” which means you’re considered a “radical” provocateur of “class warfare” if you talk about class out loud. It’s classy not to talk about class. Apparently, panhandling policies geared toward removing the poor from sight aren’t enough. Now, we don’t want to even hear from poor folk. Today’s motto is: the poor should not be seen, or heard. Next stop: eugenics. Survival of the richest.

It’s no longer compassionate to serve the poor anything other than a nice, warm cup of shut-the-hell-up to go with their healthy portion of Bill Cosby sermon. Outside of pious worship services and stop-gap charity organizations, you can’t talk about poverty without explicitly or implicitly implying that the poor deserve to be poor because they’re stupid and lazy.

Even the leading Democrat candidates are careful not to utter the words “poor” or “working-class” in their speeches. It’s all about “the middle class” — a phrase more slippery than a hockey rink covered in Crisco.

Of course, there’s lots of vague and vacuous verbiage slithering out of politicians mouths. Words like “change” and “hope” and “experience.” And “middle class” — for which, there’s simply no consensus on how to clearly define. Ask the world’s economists for a definition, line their answers up next to each other, and you still couldn’t reach a conclusion.

OK, that’s an exaggeration. Economists have a squishy sense of what kind of loot qualifies as middle-class. But even that’s misleading because being middle-class isn’t just about income. What’s middle-class on Cape Cod is different than what’s middle-class in Charlotte, N.C. or Marin Country, California, for example. Depending on where you live, the price of middle-class life varies.

And depending on what expert you ask, middle-class income ranges from $40,000 to $100,000 a year, give or take. But if you ask Mr. and Mrs. Average American, you’ll get a much different picture. According to the National Opinion Research Center, 50 percent of families who earn between $20,000 and $40,000 a year think of themselves as “working class” or “middle-class.” Nearly 40 percent of families earning between $40,000 and $60,000 annually, and 16 percent of families who earn over $110,000 a year, think of themselves as “middle class.”

Congress recently asked its research service to define “middle class.” Using 2005 Census Bureau data, and beginning with a look at income levels, CRS found 40 percent of the nearly 115 million households in the U.S. earned less than $36,000 a year. The next 40 percent rung up the economic ladder made between $36,000 and $91,705 annually. The top 20 percent made $91,705 or more.

But, as MSNBC reported, “those numbers don’t adequately reflect the state of mind of those who consider themselves middle class. Surveys have shown that, while people consider $40,000 a year to be the low end of what it takes to buy a middle-class life, some people who make as much as $200,000 a year still consider themselves middle class.”

The popular middle-class state-of-mind may explain why politicians pander to the mushy middle but that shouldn’t be confused with populism or appealing to the true American majority. Close to half of all American households are bringing in less than $36K a year!

Of course, John, it’s ridiculous to think the life-opportunities for a family earning $40,000 annually — a quarter of which might go to pay daycare expenses — is even in the same ballpark as 200K a year families. And that’s what’s got me scratching my head.

When presidential candidates talk about “the middle class,” are they talking 200K or the 20 to 40K range? It would be interesting (and maybe disheartening) to hear the candidates get more specific about which “middle-class” they’re referring.

I won’t hold my breath, waiting for an answer. So I figured I’d write to you, John, because you have a better view. Maybe you can tell me: where’s the working-class hero?