The Rag Blog

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?

When the Tonkin Gulf incident took place in early August 1964, I was a journeyman CIA analyst in what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “the bowels of the agency.” As current intelligence referent for Russian policy toward Southeast Asia and China, I worked very closely with those responsible for analysis of Vietnam and China.

Out of that experience I must say that, as much as one might be tempted to laugh at the bizarre antics of Sunday’s incident involving small Iranian boats and US naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, this is – as my old Russian professor used to say – nothing to laugh.

The situation is so reminiscent of what happened-and didn’t happen-from Aug 2-4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin and in Washington, it is in no way funny. At the time, the US had about 16,000 troops in South Vietnam. The war that was “justified” by the Tonkin Gulf resolution of Aug. 7, 1964 led to a buildup to 535,000 US troops in the late Sixties, 58,000 of whom were killed-not to mention the estimated two million Vietnamese who lost their lives by then and in the ensuing ten years.

Ten years. How can our president speak so glibly about ten more years of a U.S. armed presence in Iraq? Wonder why he doesn’t know anything about Vietnam.

Intelligence Lessons From Vietnam and Iraq

What follows is written primarily for honest intelligence analysts and managers still on “active duty.” The issuance of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was particularly welcome to those of us who had been hoping there were enough of you left who had not been thoroughly corrupted by former CIA Director George Tenet and his flock of malleable managers.

We are not so much surprised at the integrity of Tom Fingar, who is in charge of national intelligence analysis. He showed his mettle in manfully resisting forgeries and fairy tales about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” What is, frankly, a happy surprise is the fact that he and other non-ideologues and non-careerist professionals have been able to prevail and speak truth to power on such dicey issues as Iran-nuclear, the upsurge in terrorism caused by the US invasion of Iraq, and the year-old NIE saying Iraq is headed for hell in a hand basket (with no hint that a “surge” could make a difference).

But those are the NIEs. They share the status of “supreme genre” of analytic product with the President’s Daily Brief and other vehicles for current intelligence, the field in which I labored, first in the analytic trenches and then as a briefer at the White House, for most of my 27-year career. True, the NIE “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction” of Oct. 1, 2002 (wrong on every major count) greased the skids for the attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003. But it is more often current intelligence that is fixed upon to get the country into war.

The Tonkin Gulf events are perhaps the best case in point. We retired professionals are hopeful that Fingar can ensure integrity in the current intelligence process as well as in intelligence estimates.

Salivating for Wider War: Tonkin Gulf

Given the confusion last Sunday in the Persian Gulf, you need to remember that a “known known” in the form of a non-event has already been used to sell a major war-Vietnam. It is not only in retrospect that we know that no attack occurred that night.

Those of us in intelligence, not to mention President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy all knew full well that the evidence of any armed attack on the evening of Aug. 4, 1964, the so-called “second” Tonkin Gulf incident, was highly dubious. But it fit the president’s purposes, so they lent a hand to facilitate escalation of the war.

During the summer of 1964 President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were eager to widen the war in Vietnam. They stepped up sabotage and hit-and-run attacks on the coast of North Vietnam. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later admitted that he and other senior leaders had concluded that the seaborne attacks “amounted to little more than pinpricks” and “were essentially worthless,” but they continued.

Concurrently, the National Security Agency was ordered to collect signals intelligence from the North Vietnamese coast on the Gulf of Tonkin, and the surprise coastal attacks were seen as a helpful way to get the North Vietnamese to turn on their coastal radars. The destroyer USS Maddox, carrying electronic spying gear, was authorized to approach as close as eight miles from the coast and four miles from offshore islands, some of which had been subjected to intense shelling by clandestine attack boats.

As James Bamford describes it in “Body of Secrets:”

“The twin missions of the Maddox were in a sense symbiotic. The vessel’s primary purpose was to act as a seagoing provocateur-to poke its sharp gray bow and the American flag as close to the belly of North Vietnam as possible, in effect shoving its 5-inch cannons up the nose of the Communist navy. In turn, this provocation would give the shore batteries an excuse to turn on as many coastal defense radars, fire control systems, and communications channels as possible, which could then be captured by the men…at the radar screens. The more provocation, the more signals…

“The Maddox’ mission was made even more provocative by being timed to coincide with commando raids, creating the impression that the Maddox was directing those missions and possibly even lobbing firepower in their support….

“North Vietnam also claimed at least a twelve-mile limit and viewed the Maddox as a trespassing ship deep within its territorial waters.” (pp 295-296)

On Aug. 2, 1964 an intercepted message ordered North Vietnamese torpedo boats to attack the Maddox. The destroyer was alerted and raced out to sea beyond reach of the torpedoes, three of which were fired in vain at the destroyer’s stern. The Maddox’ captain suggested that the rest of his mission be called off, but the Pentagon refused. And still more commando raids were launched on Aug. 3, shelling for the first time targets on the mainland, not just the offshore islands.

Early on Aug. 4, the Maddox captain cabled his superiors that the North Vietnamese believed his patrol was directly involved with the commando raids and shelling. That evening at 7:15 (Vietnam time) the Pentagon alerted the Maddox to intercepted messages indicating that another attack by patrol boats was imminent.

What followed was panic and confusion. There was a score of reports of torpedo and other hostile attacks, but no damage and growing uncertainty as to whether any attack actually took place. McNamara was told that “freak radar echoes” were misinterpreted by “young fellows” manning the sonar, who were “apt to say any noise is a torpedo.”

This did not prevent McNamara from testifying to Congress two days later that there was “unequivocal proof” of a new attack. And based largely on that, on the following day (Aug. 7) Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution bringing ten more years of war.

Meanwhile, in the Trenches

By the afternoon of Aug. 4 (Washington time), the CIA’s expert analyst on North Vietnam (let’s call him “Tom”) had concluded that probably no one had fired on US ships in the Tonkin Gulf over the past 24 hours. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning.

And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer whom Tom had never before seen, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained:

“We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam. We have to keep our lines open to the White House.”

“Tom” later bemoaned-quite rightly: “What do we need lines open for, if we’re not going to use them, and use them to tell the truth?”

A year or two ago, in the wake of the policy/intelligence fiasco on Iraq, I would have been inclined to comment sarcastically, “How quaint; how obsolete.” But the good news is that the analysts writing the National Intelligence Estimates have now reverted to the ethos in which “Tom” and I were proud to work.

Today’s analysts/reporters of current intelligence need to follow their good example. And we trust that Tom Fingar will hold their feet to the fire. For if they don’t rise to the challenge, the consequences are sure to be disastrous. This should be obvious in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf experience, not to mention the more recent performance of senior officials before the attack on Iraq in 2003.

The late Ray S. Cline, who at the time was the boss of the Director of Current Intelligence, said he was “very sure” that no attack took place on Aug. 4. He suggested that McNamara had shown the president unevaluated signals intelligence which referred to the (real) earlier attack on Aug. 2 rather than the non-event on the 4th. There was no sign of remorse on Cline’s part that he didn’t step in and make sure the president was told the truth.

We in the trenches knew there was no attack; and so did the Director of Current Intelligence as well as Cline, who was Deputy Director for Intelligence. But all knew, as did McNamara, that President Johnson was lusting for a pretext to strike the North and escalate the war. And so, like B’rer Rabbit, they didn’t say nothin’.

Commenting on the interface of intelligence and policy on Vietnam, a well respected, retired senior CIA officer addressed:

“… the dilemma CIA directors and senior intelligence professionals face in cases when they know that unvarnished intelligence judgments will not be welcomed by the President, his policy managers, and his political advisers…[They] must decide whether to tell it like it is (and so risk losing their place at the President’s advisory table), or to go with the flow of existing policy by accentuating the positive (thus preserving their access and potential influence). In these episodes from the Vietnam era, we have seen that senior CIA officers more often than not tended toward the latter approach.” “CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968″ Harold P. Ford

Bummer. I wish there were more of a sense of anger at that.

Back to Iran. This time, we all know that the president and vice president are seeking an excuse to attack Iran. There is a big difference from the situation in the summer of 1964, when President Johnson had intimidated all his senior subordinates into using deceit to escalate the war. Bamford comments on the disingenuousness of Robert McNamara when he testified in 1968 that it was “inconceivable” that senior officials, including the president, deliberately used the Tonkin Gulf events to generate Congressional support for a wider Vietnam war.

In Bamford’s words, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had become “a sewer of deceit,” with Operation Northwoods and other unconscionable escapades to its credit. Then-Under Secretary of State George Ball commented, “There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that this would provide the provocation we needed.”

Good News: It’s Different Now

As indicated above, we now have more integrity at the top of the intelligence community. But, in my view, the main thing that has prevented Bush and Cheney from attacking Iran so far has been the strong opposition of the uniformed military, including the Joint Chiefs. The circumstances attending the misadventure last Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz are far from clear. But the incident certainly shows that our senior military need all the help they can get from intelligence officers more concerned with the truth than with “keeping lines open to the White House” and doing its bidding.

In addition, today the intelligence oversight committees in Congress seem to be waking from their Rip Van Winkle-like slumber. It was Congress, after all, that ordered the controversial NIE on Iran/nuclear (and was among those pushing strongly that it be publicized). And the flow of substantive intelligence to Congress is much larger than it was in 1964 when, remember, there were no intelligence committees as such.

So listen, you inheritors of the honorable profession of current intelligence, don’t let them grind you down. If you’re working in the bowels of the agency and you find that your leaders are cooking intelligence to a recipe for casus belli, think long and hard about the oath you took to protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Should not that oath transcend in importance any secrecy promise you had to agree to as a condition of employment?

By sticking your neck out, you might be able to prevent ten years of unnecessary war.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer, then a current intelligence analyst at CIA, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

“It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.” Joseph Stalin

11/01/08 “ICH” — — Something doesn’t ring true about Hillary’s “upset” victory in the New Hampshire primary. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. All the exit polls showed Clinton trailing Obama by significant margins. In fact, in the Gallup Poll taken just days before the election, “Crocodile tears” Hillary was down by a whopping 13 points. Her “turnaround” was not only unexpected, but downright shocking. The results for the rest of the candidates–excluding Clinton and Obama—were all within the margin of error. Clinton was the only anomaly. Surprise, surprise.

If this election had been conducted in any other country in the world, the Bush administration would have immediately dispatched an independent team of election observers and demanded a recount. But not in the good old USA, where stealing elections is replacing baseball as the national pastime. Would it surprise you to know that (according to Black Box Voting) the Marketing and Sales Director of the company that tallies the votes (LHS) “was arrested, indicted, and pleaded guilty to “sale / CND” and sentenced to 12 months in the Rockingham County Correctional facility, and fined $2000.” That would be LHS Sales Director Mr. Ken Hajjar. Here’s an excerpt from Bev Harris’s Black Box Voting web site:

“The Diebold ballot printing plant at the time we got records on the overages (that is, more ballots than needed for election; MW) was being run by a convicted felon who had spent four years in prison on a narcotics trafficking charge. No, not New Hampshire’s voting machine programming exec Ken Hajjar, who cut a plea deal in 1990 for his role in cocaine distribution. This was another convicted felon, John Elder, who ran the Diebold ballot printing plant; he’s now an elections consultant.” (Source)

Still feel confident about the election results?

Then why not spend 5 minutes perusing this you-tube demonstration that shows how anyone with a screwdriver and a brain the size of a walnut can transform a ‘humiliating defeat’ into a miraculous Clintonesque “comeback”. YouTube video

The you-tube video also shows LHS’s owner defending the dubious record of his optical scanning hardware in court. The reader can decide for himself whether we’re dealing with a man of impeccable integrity or another flannel-mouth opportunist who has enriched himself at the expense of our basic democratic institutions.

Bradblog’s Dori Smith reports that Sales Director “Hajjar totes memory cards around in the trunk of his car and defends the practice of swapping out memory cards during the middle of elections.” (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5320) Nice touch, eh?

Smith also adds this revealing tidbit:

“Other LHS staff members we spoke with, including Mike Carlson and Tom Burge, provided similar comments. They said they would open machines up during an election and swap memory cards as needed. This is illegal under Connecticut law and Deputy Secretary Mara told us she has since informed LHS that such actions were in violation of Connecticut election laws.” Source

“So what’s all the fuss? I’ll just slip this little card in the slot and—Lookee here—Hillary’s a winner; just like I figured.”

Activist Nancy Tobi provides a great summary of the back-room machinations in her article “Democracy for New Hampshire” which came out the day after the primary:

“81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as “Premier”). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. People like to say “but we use paper ballots! They can always be counted by hand!”

But they’re not. They’re counted by Diebold. Only a candidate can request a hand recount, and most never do so. And a rigged election can easily become a rigged recount, as we learned in Ohio 2004, where two election officials were convicted of rigging their recount. (Is it just a funny coincidence that Diebold spokesman is named Mr. Riggall?)

We need to get the count right on election night. Right now, nobody in New Hampshire, except the programmers at LHS Associates and Diebold Election Systems, knows if we are getting it right or wrong.”

Good job, Nancy.

Does it seem to you, dear reader, that we could save the taxpayer a lot of money and trouble by just returning to the “old system” of letting 9 judges on the Supreme Court chose our leaders? Why do we continue with this pointless sham?

Look, our elections are being run by corporations that have an obvious stake in the outcome. There’s a heap of money involved and nothing is left to chance. The media’s job is to make us feel like we have a choice. We don’t.

The only reason the farce continues is because the ruling elite believe that perception management is the cheapest way to control the bewildered herd. And, of course, they’re right. Pulling a lever every 4 years is a type of political empowerment. It makes us feel like we’re part of the decision-making process, which makes it easier to accept the “shittier and shittier paying jobs”, the curtailed civil liberties and the endless wars. (Thanks George Carlin)

This year we can choose from a slate of 8 candidates; all of whom are members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations; and all of whom are wholly committed to the off-shoring of businesses, the outsourcing of jobs, the expansion of police-state powers, and the obscene enlargement the already over-bloated War Machine. The only exceptions are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich who are treated like pariahs by the establishment media.

As for Hillary; she won nothing. The results are completely bogus. Her weepy performance before the balloting was orchestrated to create a credible narrative to explain the fraudulent shifting of votes away from Obama. It was exactly the same trick that Karl Rove played in 2004, when he had the entire corporate media standing behind his cockamamie story that 3 or 4 million fundamentalists—who had never voted before in a general election—suddenly poured down from the mountains to cast their ballot for their champion, George Bush. This absurd narrative was spouted from every media-soapbox in the nation until it was generally accepted as fact. The media then proceeded to quash any investigation of the massive voter fraud which took place across the country (particularly in Ohio) while discrediting critics as conspiracy theorists.

“Conspiracy theorists?”

Is it a conspiracy to think that the same guys who abduct foreign nationals off the streets of cities around the world and take them to black sites—where their eyes are gouged out and their finger nails ripped off—would get squeamish over something as trivial as ballot stuffing?

Get real!

Clinton’s tearful antics were right out of Karl Rove’s “Dirty Tricks Playbook”. Chapter one: Invent a believable storyline, run it through the Propaganda Ministry (the media) and stick with it no matter how ridiculous it sounds.

I carry no brief for Obama or Clinton and I don’t see any substantial difference between either of them. They are both water carriers for their far-right constituents. It is the system that’s important. And the system is broken.

11/01/08 “ICH” — — In the many, (too many) gang interviews that are currently called debates by the mainstream media, the question is asked at each gathering, “What will you do on your first day in office?’ The candidates of both parties will harrangue and equivocate, one after another, but not one will reply with the answer that would gladden the heart of a real progressive, Constitution-loving citizen of the United States. Can’t you just imagine the roar of approval if any one of the prospective Presidents would give the following answer?

“On my first day in office, I will sign an Executive Order which will cancel every Executive Order instituted by any former President. I will open the records of every official department to the Freedom of Information Act so that the press and, thereby, the people can learn what has really happened to the liberties which every one of us once took for granted. In addition, I will send a letter to Congress stating that, despite the “exception statements” that may have been signed by any former President, every law that has been passed by them and signed into law will be followed in both letter and intent by this administration. Further, the powers claimed by the Executive Branch will be those outlined in the Constitution; no more and no less.”

Why is it so impossible for anyone to run for the highest office in the land without acknowledging their recognition of the true problems of our democracy and the necessity to restore its once-proud state of affairs? They touch upon the Iraq War and debate how and when to disengage American troops but refuse to touch the question of the lies that put them there. They will turn over and discuss briefly the milliions of illegal aliens but never bring up the Mexican military incursions into our sovereign territory as protection for their drug runners. They lament the state of our economy but not one, of either party, has any plans or even suggestions as to how to deal with it. True, some on the far right will offer that taxation must be ended, the Internal Revenue Service eliminated, and Social Security “drowned in the bathtub”, but none are able to project what would happen next.

As a vastly important “planning meeting” is being conducted in Oklahoma to try to build compromise and pull the political scene back to “the middle” with “compromise and coalition”, all we see from any candidate is precisely “compromise and coalition” as every one of them claims to be in the “middle-of-the-road”. Meanhwile, the few who might speak for the disenchanted, like Dennis Kucinich on one side and Ron Paul on the other, are discredited and ignored by most of the media so that there is really no chance for their views to be considered by the “slobbering masses”. Only one candidate, former Senator John Edwards, even comes close to expressing our hopes and fears.

Born without the proverbial “silver foot in his mouth”. he worked his way through college and has made his fortune by his own legalistic abilities. He knows the worries of working-class families and, though winning no primaries, has made a respectable showing in all, not only this year, but sufficiently in 2004 to become the candidate for vice.President. Hwoever, lacking the glamor and charisma of Obama and Clinton, he is evidently not going to be the “people’s choice”, and that is to our detriment. Our choices have been made by the media.

The progressive movement turned out in force in 2006, defeated many of the hard-core Bushites and installed “liberal” Democrats in their stead. It didn’t help. They were stymied at every turn by their business-as-usual senior colleagues of both parties who really understood “how the game is played”. Congressman Robert Wexler has accumulated over 200,000 signatures on a petition to impeach vice-President Dick Cheney but don’t bet on it ever getting to the floor of Congress or, for that matter, the presence of the good Congressman there after the next election. The people in Congress say that it would do no good for them to begin anything that would not go through the Senate and the Senators will not approve or even propose anything at all unless they have the backing of a veto-proof majority. Both sides are desperately afraid of provoking a filibuster so, if they can’t work out a compromise, they will do nothing. Never mind the hordes of hurting folks out here who are screaming, “You can’t do anything unless you try!”

As the politicking season began, we were faced with choosing between several of these Senators, all of whom are charter members of a “do-nothing” Congress and all scrambling for the “middle of the road”. The two exceptions on the Democratic side are Congressman Kucinich and former Senator John Edwards but, instead, the media spotlight shines only for the glamour and charisma of the inexperienced Senator Obama and the all-too-experienced Senator Clinton who must have callouses on her behind from “straddling the fence”.

Must we wait until the nation is in another Great Depression before the huddled masses realize what their negligence and nonchalance has cost before we can anticipate a “savior” arising who can put our democracy back together on the pattern set out by our Founding Fathers and we can again walk in the sunshine of freedom and equality? I shall not be here to see it but I have the utmost confidence that the blood of our forebears will arise, even if belatedly, but I believe that it can and will be done once the people awake and arise. Otherwise, we will all go down in history alongside ancient Greece and the mighty Roman Empire as an example of the folly of caring only too late to preserve our own honor.

I was a kid in 1968. It was the year I turned 13 and it was the year my dad began to prepare to go to Vietnam. The Tet offensive was on the television in January. The picture of the South Vietnamese police chief killing a suspected NLF fighter shook up our dinner table the night it was in the news. After that, my father didn’t watch television news when his younger kids were around. I won grand prize in the science fair at my junior high for an investigation into whether or not my pet guppies talked. Then I won first place in my division at the statewide fair held the last weekend in March of that year at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House.

My dad picked me up after the fair closed down. After we had packed the exhibit in the trunk of his station wagon, we got in the front seat. On the way from College Park, MD to our house in Laurel, MD-about ten miles away-we listened to the speech by President Johnson where he told the nation that he would not “seek or accept the nomination” for his party’s candidacy for the presidency. After a brief discussion with my dad about what this meant and why it happened, we turned to a conversation about the differences between FM and AM radio. Then he told me that he had been given orders to go to Vietnam. I didn’t say anything while he told me when he thought he would be leaving and what it meant for the family. He never mentioned whether he thought what he would be doing there was right or wrong. When we got home, I talked with my parents for a few minutes and went to bed.

The next day in Social Studies class the teacher talked about how remarkable it was that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for reelection. From there, he segued into a conversation about the elections. After a quick show of hands regarding who we supported, he asked me why I supported Gene McCarthy. I told him it was because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In fact, McCarthy was calling for a negotiated settlement with the northern Vietnamese and the NLF while everyone else (except for maybe Bobby Kennedy) was still talking about some kind of victory. There was only one other person in the class who supported McCarthy. Two or three others supported Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the race only days before. Most supported either Humphrey (who was LBJ’s replacement) or Nixon. On the playground at lunch that day, one of the Nixon supporters called me a faggot because I supported McCarthy.

Three days later, April 4, 1968, I was watching TV with my older sister when the graphic before a breaking news bulletin flashed across the screen. I walked over to the TV and turned up the volume. (There were no remotes back then.) A talking head came on the screen and announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew this was something big. I sat down to watch the incoming news while my sister put our younger siblings to bed. I knew that King had been in Memphis supporting a strike of sanitation workers and that there had been trouble at one of the marches. When our parents got home, I told my father what had happened. He sat down for a few minutes and watched as news reports filtered in about angry blacks gathering in different parts of Washington, DC. That night, I listened to WTOP–the all news station in DC– relay reports on the growing insurrection in that city and around the nation. When I got up to deliver my newspaper route the next morning, the front page was covered with banner headlines and full color pictures of the assassination and the angry response.

The following week, our family attended a cookout at a neighbor’s house down the block in our lily-white middle class suburban development. Most of Maryland was under curfew, gun sales were forbidden and liquor sales had been stopped in DC, Baltimore and several counties. While I ate beans, salad and burgers from the paper plate I had loaded up, some of the adults conversed about the murder and the insurrection. The remarks I heard from some of the neighbors changed my impression of them forever. I had never heard such racist remarks before except from some of the working class toughs who wore their hair greased back like early Elvis and smoked cigarettes while hanging out in front of the Peoples Drug Store at the local shopping center. If I learned one thing that night, it was that the ignorance of racism knew no class boundaries. The names they called Martin Luther King and the suggestions they had for the local police to “keep order” in the black section of town were reminiscent of the Klan literature one of my newspaper customers gave me almost every time I collected his month’s payment from him. Literature that I threw away after reading it the first time and being repulsed by the hatred therein.

After the King assassination I began to read the newspaper much more carefully. Not just the sports section like before, but all of the news sections as well. Prior to that, I had skimmed the front page and the local section, but had never really read anything too carefully. As the presidential campaign heated up, I switched my allegiance to Bobby Kennedy. His ability to gather huge crowds no matter where he showed up-West Virginia one day and Washington, DC the next-was impressive. He had somehow figured out how to speak to people on a different level than all of the other candidates and he said he was against the war. Meanwhile, I had discovered another newspaper that told a completely different story. That paper was Washington DC’s first underground paper, The Washington Free Press. A friend’s older brother who went to the University of Maryland used to give me his old copies when he was done with them. Somewhere not very far from the boring suburban redneck town that I lived in there was something going on that was both new and connected to the revolution I was certain had to be happening somewhere. It had to be happening because the Beatles were singing about it, the Rolling Stones seemed to have joined it, and the Free Press reported it. I didn’t understand why they didn’t like Kennedy or thought the elections were bullshit but I wanted to find out why.

When Bobby Kennedy was killed I was watching TV with my sister once again. I remember feeling angry, sad and bitter all at the same time. After he was killed I gave up on the elections for a while. No more passing out campaign literature at the shopping center or door to door. There was nothing left to do but wait until the convention and hope some kind of miracle happened that would stop the war. A war my dad was heading off to in a few short months. In late July we took a family vacation at a beach near Norfolk, VA. My father was getting ready to go to some kind of school there that was required before he went away to Vietnam. The name of that school? Air War College. You don’t have to guess what the general course of studies was. After a week, my older sister and I returned to Laurel. I delivered my newspapers, mowed lawns for the neighbors and hung out with my friends listening to music, reading, and watching TV. It was one of those nights of TV watching when another news bulletin flashed across the screen. Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. This was a year for news bulletins. I followed this event with interest because I was secretly hoping that the Czechs truly could find some kind of humane alternative to both Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, even if that terminology was unknown to me at the time.

Not long after that night, I began watching the coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I recall a sign shown on television that said “Welcome to Czechago.” Those few nights of watching cops beat the shit out of people and politicians showing their true colors-be they fascist in nature or on the side of the protesters-did more to educate and radicalize me than pretty much anything I had ever read or would ever read in my life. The angry repartee between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal on one of the networks gelled in my mind along with pictures of tear gas, bloodied reporters, people chanting “The whole world’s watching,” and my mom crying because her country was falling to pieces. When my dad came home for a weekend, he tried to convince me that the protesters were wrong and that voting was the way to solve the country’s problems. I was not convinced.

By this time, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain was getting closer and closer to a mark not reached by a major league pitcher in many seasons. He was approaching thirty wins. Although I had given my heart to the Red Sox the year before, I tried to watch or listen to every game McLain pitched. If it wasn’t on TV and I couldn’t get the game over my AM radio via the nighttime skip phenomenon that somehow brought the games to my transistor, then I reconstructed the box scores the next morning before I delivered my papers. When the World Series came around, I was pulling for Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals. I loved to watch Gibson pitch even though he had beat the Red Sox the year before.

Meanwhile, in school we were composing a scrapbook for the elections. Each of us had to choose either Nixon or Humphrey for our scrapbook and fill it with materials related to the campaign. I chose Humphrey, even though he was for the war, he wasn’t Nixon. When it came time to turn in the scrapbook, I covered the front of the binder with “Dick Gregory for President” stickers. My teacher was not happy. She yelled at me and asked how I could support someone who opposed the war when my dad was on his way over there. I snidely suggested that the answer was obvious and ended up being sent to the counselor. He yelled at me and told me to get my head out of my ass. I left there thinking that he should do the same.

On election day we watched the final returns come in over the television in our social studies class. There weren’t any exit poll projections back then. The news people actually let the election run its course. When Walter Cronkite said that Nixon had won I had a feeling that the world as I knew it was over. In fact, it was only getting worse. The difference was now I was aware of it. I didn’t hit the streets in protest for another year but I was already there in my heart and soul.

“At the edge of the Rubicon, men don’t go fishing.” “Richard Nixon” in the 1987 Opera, “Nixon in China”

“I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions.” George W. Bush, January 4th, 2008 Interview for Israel’s Channel 2

Those familiar with the Tarot know that the figure depicted on the first card in the deck is the Magician. The Magician is a very powerful figure, for seemingly he creates realities where before there was nothing. A clear indication of this creative power is the presence on the card of the mathematical sign for infinity — — representing the possessor of all knowledge (magi), all space, all time going forward.

But those who would ask the Magician to “perform” need be wary of what the response is. In some cultures, the magician is a trickster whose real objective is to deceive–sometime with devastating consequences for the interlocutor. And when that interlocutor is the President of the United States, the consequences of deception can be earth-shattering.

Think back to June 16th, 2001, when George Bush and Vladimir Putin met for the first time in Slovenia. In answer to a reporter’s question about whether the U.S. could trust Russia (and by implication, Putin), Bush replied: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.” At this time, before Russia regained economic strength from rising oil prices, before September 11th, 2001, before Iraq, Bush saw himself as the man who would make things happen. After all, as the new millennium opened, the United States was indisputably the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

In short, even then Bush saw himself as the Magician, as the “decider.” In reality, those who see themselves in that role are sure to be deceived, for they are focused on that which is intended to distract attention from what is really happening. The power of any good Magician, after all, is to be able to conjure an illusion that holds the attention of his audience long enough to reveal the reality that has always existed but was hidden.

Fast forward to late 2007-early 2008. With one year left in his presidency, George Bush has no significant positive foreign policy achievements. At the beginning of 2007, he sent 40,000 additional U.S. troops into Iraq to stave off increased sectarian and ethnic depredations. In January 2008, he is sending 3,200 more troops into Afghanistan to try to stabilize conditions there. The attempt to push forward the “roadmap” for Mid-East peace–starting with the November 22nd Annapolis summit, had bogged down and, unless re-invigorated, would likely stall as had all previous efforts.

We may never know who the “Magician” behind the curtain was who kept the props in place while the actors played their parts on history’s center stage. But assume he or she finally succeeded in pushing forward one other long-standing issue whose resolution in 2008 would guarantee George Bush’s coveted positive mark on world history. It would, if successful, rival the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China in 1972 in its impact.

But like Nixon-Kissinger in 1972, powerful centers in the U.S. would oppose the opening–and the same could be expected in the country to which the opening would be made. The whole project would have to be concealed; the attention of the media, the American public, and most of those in the U.S. administration, had to be diverted. The presidential campaigns in the U.S. would help, but the background rhetoric would have to be steady and highly critical.

What the Magician intended–and Bush finally agreed to do–was to go to Tehran to end 30 years of estrangement with Iran.

The grand distraction would be a trip ostensibly to reenergize the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But while everyone was focused on that process, the “exploratory” talks about talks in Baghdad between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kasemi Qumi, really would be working out details of the visit to Iran.

Among all the warnings of the dangers a nuclear Iran represented to the other Gulf states, despite the charges that Iran was supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons used to kill U.S. troops in Iraq, the hidden exchanges never faltered–unlike in 2003 when the U.S. abruptly cut contact with Tehran.

It was in his December 4th, 2007 press conference, after release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, that Bush signaled he was prepared to make the leap: “On the one hand, we should exert pressure, and on the other hand, we should provide the Iranians a way forward. And our hope is that the Iranians will get diplomacy back on track.”

Thirty days passed. Just as Nixon had worried that something would derail his opening to China, Bush could see his legacy disappearing. Then on January 3rd, 2008, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking to a small group of Iranian students, signaled back: “I would be the first one to support these relations. Of course we never said the severed relations were forever. But for the time being, it (restoring ties) (would) provide an opportunity for security agents to come and go, as well as for espionage.”

But was this reply a yes or a no? Were the Iranians about to pull the rug from under the secret negotiations for the visit? Three days passed. Suddenly the whole project seemed lost because of what appeared to be a serious incident-at-sea between three U.S. warships and five Iranian fast patrol boats. Someone in a senior position in Tehran, opposed to any rapprochement and having control of military sea craft, must have suspected something was about to happen.

And although the U.S. press played up the encounter’s hazards–and began to probe deeper into other incidents that might lead them toward the Magician and his illusion of countries-at-odds–the official Iranian version (after denying that the encounter ever occurred) stressed that the meeting was a routine exchange of ship identities, course and intent and that no hostile actions took place.

Nonetheless, some in the U.S. press immediately equated this modern-day encounter to the August 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin” incident which led to a major escalation of U.S. troop units in South Vietnam. Interestingly, word of the encounter leaked first from the White House, but reporters had to go to the Pentagon for the details–most of which were still murky.

Departure day for the Mid-East trip arrived. As Air Force One became airborne, Bush found himself in a quandary similar to Richard Nixon in 1972: then, when the American president landed in Beijing, he still had no assurance he would be able to meet directly with Chairman Mao.

He did, and changed U.S. relations in Asia and the globe. Then the issues were 55,000 dead in South Vietnam, a looming recession, the price of oil soon to (for then) skyrocket, and the abandonment of the gold standard.

Today the issues for Bush are 4,400 U.S. dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, a looming recession, the price of oil on the verge of skyrocketing, the precipitous decline of the dollar against other currencies, the troubled housing market, global warming, and U.S. Iranian relations. Of these, only on the latter is Bush still “the decider”–or rather co-decider.

* If he didn’t go to Tehran, obviously nothing in U.S.-Iranian relations would change, and Bush would miss the last opportunity for a legacy.

* If he went but Khamenei refused to see him, his “grand opening” would be incomplete and thus his historical stature would be forever diminished.

* But should he go, and should he and Khamenei meet, even though nothing substantive occurred, the illusion would dominate.

Is there still a Magician in the house?