The Rag Blog

The U.S. establishment’s acceptance of a possible war with Iran shows that the folly that led to Iraq still rules Washington.

Nov. 6, 2007 | The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months.

Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months.

The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.

The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. Five years ago, a wounded, fearful and enraged America was ready to attack anybody, and Bush waved his red cape and steered the mad bull toward Iraq. We now know that was folly. The completely unnecessary invasion has so far resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and almost 4,000 Americans, severely destabilized the region, cost billions of dollars, and increased the threat of terrorism. Yet today we are blithely considering attacking a much larger Middle Eastern country for equally dubious reasons, and mainstream politicians and the media are once again going along. The American people have signed off on the conventional “wisdom.” In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans say they would support attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is surreal. It’s as if we’re back on Sept. 12 and Iraq never happened.

It is not surprising that the GOP is calling for a wider Mideast war. The party has nothing except fear to sell: Its initials might as well stand for “Grand Orgy of Paranoia.” But the acquiescence of many Democrats, and the mainstream media, shows just how intractable are the myths and fallacies about the Middle East and terrorism.

Four related misconceptions continue to distort our Middle East policy: the terrorism freakout, the Satan myth, the they’re-all-the-same fallacy, and the belief that we’re innocent.

In many ways the terrorism freakout is our founding error, one that predates 9/11 by decades. Our obsession with terrorism, our failure to place it in historical context, our hypocrisy in defining it, and our overreaction to it have marred our ability to craft an intelligent Middle East policy. It has seriously deformed our response to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis (still the region’s key conflict), provided much of the impetus for the Iraq war, and now is paving the way for possible war with Iran.

America’s response to Palestinian terrorism has set the tone for our subsequent responses to the phenomenon. No one condones terrorism: It is morally repugnant to kill civilians, no matter how legitimate the terrorists’ political goals may be. But by simply declaring that Palestinian terrorism was evil, and refusing to acknowledge or address the Palestinians’ legitimate grievances, America long ago locked itself into a morally incoherent, historically obtuse and ultimately self-defeating position. As Robert Fisk noted in “The Great War for Civilisation,” because of America’s pro-Israel bias, it has always seen Palestinian terrorism as “comfortably isolated from reason, cause or history … ‘Terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence — our violence — which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.” The uncomfortable fact is that Israeli-Palestinian crisis is the crucial frame through which America has always understood the Middle East: Palestinians were the first of a long line of Arab and Muslim supervillains. Once we ourselves suffered a massive terrorist attack, our atavistic rage at these evildoers knew no bounds — and it was easy for the Bush administration to persuade us to attack Iraq.

Our overreaction to terrorism, combined with military triumphalism, found its supreme expression in Vice President Dick Cheney’s notorious “one percent doctrine,” which holds that if there is even a 1 percent chance that an enemy will acquire dangerous weapons, the United States must launch a preventive attack. As Iraq should have shown us, this doctrine is paranoid, delusional and self-defeating. (The doctrine is aptly named: It has a 1 percent chance of success.) Yet as the Iran war drums show, it still drives U.S. policy.

Hysteria about terrorism leads to a dangerous belief in the efficacy of military force. Of course U.S. forces can destroy any conventional adversary. But victory on the battlefield does not necessarily translate into foreign-policy success — especially not in an asymmetric war, like the one we face in Iraq and would face in Iran if we sent in ground forces. In fact, as Iraq should have shown us, we should wage war in the Middle East only as an absolute last resort. The costs are much too high and the risks of unintended consequences (Turkey and the Kurds, the crisis in Pakistan) too great. “Toughness” makes a great sound bite for opportunistic politicians, but in the real world it strengthens our terrorist enemies and ends up getting Americans killed for no reason.

Next comes the Satan myth, which says that our foes in the Middle East are uniquely evil, irrational, motiveless and impervious to deterrence. Just as the United States has seen the Palestinians as evil anti-Semites, not as complex actors with some legitimate historical grievances, so we saw Saddam as insane and undeterrable — and now are asked to believe the same thing about the mad mullahs of Iran. The terror attacks on 9/11, which were carried out by fanatics who really were impervious to deterrence, made the Satan myth practically untouchable. Lost in the rage and fear over the attacks was the fact that violent jihadists like al-Qaida are few in number and have almost no popular support. Claiming that Iraq, like al-Qaida, was part of an “axis of evil,” Bush used the Satan myth to sell the war against Iraq. And it now provides the key support for a war with Iran. If Iran is an insane, fanatical, undeterrable state, the equivalent of al-Qaida, then if follows that we must consider attacking it to prevent it from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The myth of a demonic, irrational, powerful Iran has no basis in fact. Iran, as Juan Cole has pointed out, “has not launched an aggressive war against a neighbor since 1785 and does not have a history of military expansionism. Its population is a third that of the United States and its military is small and weak.” Nor is it bent on fighting the United States or Israel to the death. Iran made a major peace offer to the United States in 2003, offering a comprehensive diplomatic settlement, including ending its support for Hamas and recognition of Israel, in exchange for normal relations. The Bush administration, smugly certain that it was about to get rid of the entire regime, refused to talk.

Nor is Iran undeterrable. It obviously has significant differences with the United States. But it is a rational actor, concerned like any other state to maximize its regional power and minimize threats to its existence. As Trita Parsi, author of the new book “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.,” argued in a recent piece in the Nation, “a careful study of Iran’s actions — not just its rhetoric — reveals systematic, pragmatic and cautious maneuvering toward a set goal: decontainment and the re-emergence of Iran as a pre-eminent power in the Middle East.” This is why retired Gen. John Abizaid recently said that America could live with a nuclear Iran.

Under the specious heading of “Islamofascism,” we have dangerously conflated completely different regimes and non-state actors — this is the “they’re all the same” fallacy. The Bush administration has aggressively promoted the idea that every Mideast state or militant movement that isn’t on the same side as the United States or Israel poses the same threat as al-Qaida — or simply asserted that those states are synonymous with al-Qaida, as the Bush administration did before the Iraq war. This is absurd and violates the first principle of both statesmanship and generalship: See the situation clearly and objectively. It leads to completely false assessments of entities like Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, and leads us to make far more enemies than we need to in the Arab-Muslim world.

Iran has no more to do with al-Qaida than Iraq did. Iran sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah, which have employed terrorism, but their fight is with Israel, not the United States. If we attack Iran because it supports Hezbollah, we might as well declare war on Kurdistan because it abets the PKK’s far more deadly guerrilla campaign against Turkey. By treating Iran, or national-liberation groups like Hamas, as if they were al-Qaida, the United States is making an elementary and quite dangerous category error.

The final error is our invincible belief in our innocence, which derives from our almost complete ignorance of the region’s history and its people. Americans can entertain notions of marching smartly into some Middle Eastern country, killing a bunch of evil ragheads, fixing things up, shaking hands all around, and marching out because most Americans simply have no knowledge of Middle Eastern history or America’s long and often shameful record of imperialist and colonialist meddling. Perhaps Americans might view Iran differently if more of them knew that in 1953, America and Great Britain overthrew their democratically elected leader and installed a bloody but pro-U.S. tyrant, the Shah. The 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power, and put Iran and United States on the collision course that has lasted to this day, was a direct result of that infamous coup (which we engineered because we wanted cheap Iranian oil). Neither Iranians nor anyone else in the Middle East has forgotten such matters — why should they? Until we understand and come to terms with our often-ugly track record in the region, we will be doomed to play the part of Graham Greene’s haplessly idealistic Quiet American, blundering into places we don’t understand, not knowing why the natives don’t like us, and making things infinitely worse.

There are not many indications that Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, can break away from these persistent fallacies about the Middle East and terrorism. There are a few glimmers of hope, however. Sen. Barack Obama broke decisively with the establishment position last week, stating that if elected, he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy with Iran” without preconditions. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel took the same position in a letter he sent to Bush calling for “direct, unconditional and comprehensive talks with the Government of Iran.” And in a noteworthy column, ultra-establishment pundit Fareed Zakaria recently attacked the entire set of assumptions behind the campaign to whip up war fever against Iran. “The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality,” Zakaria wrote in Newsweek.

When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater Middle East – from Pakistan to Morocco – it imagined that it could rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous and will be long-lasting.

The United States undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, said this year: “Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign policy. This was how things stood from April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson sent one million American troops to the Western Front, through to President Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. For the better part of the 20th century, Europe was our primary, vital focus.” But, he added, everything had changed and the Middle East was now, for President George Bush and his successors, “the place that Europe once was for the administrations of the 20th century” (1).

President Bush had said much the same a while earlier: “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life” (2).

This broader Middle East is an ill-defined area extending from Pakistan, through the Horn of Africa to Morocco. Since 9/11 it has become the main theatre for the deployment of US military power and the decisive, even the sole, battlefield in what the US sees as a global conflict. The region’s oil resources and strategic position, and the presence of Israel, have made it a US priority, particularly since the French and British began to withdraw after 1956. As Philippe Croz-Vincent has pointed out in a subtle analysis of the “American moment”, the Middle East has replaced Latin America as the US backyard (3). But with a major difference: Latin America was never a crucial battlefield in a third world war.

The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war.

Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat” in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.

This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords – persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6).

Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”.

As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria).

This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).

Weakened states

All this, on top of decades of dictatorship and corruption, has helped weaken states in the region. Some, like Afghanistan, have collapsed. The current break-up of Iraq is not due solely to the present conflict. A 13-year embargo (1990-2003) undermined the state and opened the door to Salafist (Sunni) influence, which filtered in along clandestine routes from Jordan with food, medicine, weapons and radical ideas (8). Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Syria, unable to ignore the instability on their borders, are all directly or indirectly pursuing their own agendas within Iraq. Attempts to rebuild central authority in Lebanon have fizzled out. The Palestinian Authority is dependent upon foreign military and economic aid, and the support of the Israeli government. Areas like Iraqi Kurdistan and Gaza are becoming autonomous and feeding the separatist ambitions of Turkey’s Kurds and the Baluch of Iran and Pakistan.

The unprecedented influence of armed groups makes any negotiation more difficult. They hold the whip hand in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Hizbullah dominates Lebanon; Hamas controls Gaza. They have proved formidably effective against the US in Iraq and against Nato in Afghanistan.

In Lebanon, Hizbullah held out for 33 days against the Israelis and changed the rules of the game: for the first time since 1948-49 a significant number of Israeli civilians were forced to abandon their homes. Despite being holed up in Gaza, Hamas is still capable of launching rockets into Israel (9).

Rudimentary, but effective and easily replaceable, munitions (IEDs, Qassam rockets, anti-tank weapons) define the limits of US and Israeli military power.

The late Ze’ev Schiff, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, gave a realistic assessment: “Even if we declare dozens of times that Hamas is under pressure and wants a ceasefire, it will not erase the fact that in the battle for Sderot, Israel has in effect been defeated… [it] is experiencing something in Sderot that it has not experienced since the war of independence, if ever: the enemy has silenced an entire city and brought normal life there to a halt” (10).

The political impasse in Palestine, the fragmentation of states and US military interventions have created a suicidal sense of despair and lend weight to the extremist assertions of al-Qaida.

On 31 August 2006, following the kidnapping in Gaza by an unknown group of two Fox News journalists, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan published an article on the third generation of Islamist militants emerging in Palestine to challenge Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They were described as having no mass support, rejecting any compromise, refusing to play by the rules of the political game, not targeting just Israelis and not limiting their demands to Palestine. The ability of groups claiming allegiance to al-Qaida to develop in Iraq and Afghanistan, to penetrate the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and establish themselves in North Africa and Somalia demonstrates the pressure that ideological extremism is capable of exerting on fragile borders.

The nationalism that has structured the broader Middle East since 1918 is now under threat from the resurgence of ethnic and religious identity – a process encouraged, consciously or not, by General David Petraeus, the current US commander in Iraq, who led the 101st Airborne Division that captured Mosul in 2003.

One of his first decisions was to create an elected council to represent the city, with separate polls for Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and Christians. No mention of Iraqis. By reducing the region to a mosaic of minorities, US policy forces everyone to identify with their community, to the detriment of any national or other loyalty (11). This undermines national cohesion and fosters conflict in Iraq now and possibly in Syria and Iran tomorrow. It encourages outside regional or international parties to intervene, manipulating local factions in pursuit of their own interests. Israel has been particularly guilty of this since the 1980s.

During Bush’s first term, the neocons developed the doctrine of “constructive instability” in the Middle East (12). As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while Israel was bombing Lebanon in July 2006: “What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East; and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.”

The cynicism of her remarks provoked caustic comments at the time, but she was, in a sense, right: since 9/11 we have witnessed the emergence of a new Middle East that bears no resemblance to anything that US politicians might have envisaged, and which has become a major and lasting destabilising factor in the world.

Translated by Donald Hounam

(1) http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/burn s.html

(2) State of the Union address, 11 January 2007;

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele ases/2007/01/20070110-7.html

(3) Philippe Droz-Vincent, Vertiges de la puissance. Le moment américain au Moyen-Orient, La Découverte, Paris, 2007.

(4) Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983, Ronald Reagan warned against the temptation “to label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding.”

(5) See Gérard Prunier, “CIA coup in Somalia”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2006.

(6) See Roland Marchal, “Somalie : un nouveau front antiterroriste?”, Les Etudes du CERI, 135, Centre d’études et de recherches internationales, Paris, June 2007.

(7) “US guns sent to Iraq used for crimes in Turkey”, International Herald Tribune, 31 August 2007.

(8) See Vali Nasr, The Shia revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future, Norton, New York, 2006.

(9) On 7 October a Katyusha-type missile, more accurate and of longer range than the Qassam, was fired from Gaza into Israel.

(10) “An Israeli defeat in Sderot”, Haaretz, Tel Aviv, 8 June 2007.

(11) There are several tribal confederations that include both Sunni and Shia; membership of a particular confederation overrides Sunni or Shia identity.

Torture is defined in many ways. To the US administration, nothing that it ever does is torture. In keeping with the notorious “Torture Memo” of August 2002, drafted primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief counsel David Addington, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (as the administration euphemistically defines its forays into torture) only actually become torture if the suffering produced is equivalent to organ failure or even death.

As a result, Dick Cheney was well within his comfort zone when, on a conservative radio show last October, he responded to a dismissively phrased question about waterboarding — “Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” — with the response, “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me.” He added, “But for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture” (courtesy of the Washington Post), and concluded with the administration’s predictable mantra, “We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.”

To others, including the State Department, waterboarding is clearly torture, as the Department declares every year when it condemns other countries for subjecting prisoners to “a dunk in the water.” But while it should be clear to all but the most vindictively brain-washed that waterboarding and other techniques which have been used in Guantánamo, and which are still part of the CIA’s arsenal (including the prolonged use of stress positions, extreme temperature manipulation, and profound sleep deprivation) are also torture, especially when their use is combined, holding a man in solitary confinement for several years is somehow seen as a soft option.

This is in spite of the fact that, when approved by Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, Defense Department lawyers warned that isolation was “not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days.” The lawyers’ warnings, it should also be noted, echoed the opinion expressed in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK Manual (with its notorious section on counter-intelligence interrogation), in which the agency warned of the “profound moral objection” of applying “duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage.”

My concern with the effects of prolonged solitary confinement hit me abruptly this week when I read — in the New York Times, one of the few media outlets to cover the story — that the case of Ali al-Marri, the last “enemy combatant” on US soil, was causing some consternation to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia.

A Qatari national and a resident alien in the United States, al-Marri had studied computer science in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, and had legally returned to the United States on September 10, 2001, with his residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family (his wife and five children) with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead.

He was then moved to a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was held incommunicado for 16 months, and where, according to statements eventually filed by his lawyers (see below), he was subjected to “inhumane, degrading, and physically and psychologically abusive treatment.” Held in “complete isolation” in a bare cell measuring nine feet by six feet in an otherwise unoccupied cell block, he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperature manipulation, was frequently deprived of food and water, and was only allowed outside for “recreation” (also alone) three times a week “when deemed to be ‘compliant.'” Reinforcing his isolation, his cell contained nothing but a Koran, a “suicide blanket” and a thin mattress, and even the window was blocked out, preventing him from ever seeing natural light or knowing the time of day.

Al-Marri also stated that, during the first year of his imprisonment in the brig, he was “interrogated repeatedly,” and he explained that his interrogators “falsely told [him] that four of his brothers and his father were in jail because of him, and promised that they would all be released if he cooperated with them,” and also “threatened to send [him] to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”

In August 2003, representatives of the International Red Cross were finally allowed to meet with al-Marri, and two months later he was finally permitted to meet with a lawyer, but despite sporadic visits from the Red Cross and his legal representatives, the extreme isolation in which he has been held (and the perpetuation of the ill-treatment outlined above) has been barely mitigated. Including the six months that he spent in isolation in Peoria County Jail and the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, before being transferred to Charleston, he has now spent four years and ten months (58 times the amount of time recommended by Defense Department lawyers) in solitary confinement.

While this is not unique — the alleged “high-value” al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah has been in solitary since March 2002, for example, and several Guantánamo detainees have also spent a substantial amount of time in a similar situation (including, currently, the British resident Shaker Aamer, who has been alone in an isolation block since August 2005) — al-Marri, as a US resident, is supposed to be protected from this sort of treatment.

The only comparable case, and one which bears close scrutiny, is that of Jose Padilla, the only other “enemy combatant” to be held for a substantial period of time on the US mainland. A US citizen, Padilla was held in the Charleston brig for three and a half years, where, crucially, the extreme isolation to which he was subjected, combined with sensory deprivation and the use of psychotropic drugs, led to the complete disintegration of his mind, according to several psychiatrists who evaluated his mental state.

According to one of al-Marri’s lawyers, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, his client’s mental disintegration has not been quite so severe, although he has been described as suffering “severe damage to his mental and emotional well-being, including hypersensitivity to external stimuli, manic behavior, difficulty concentrating and thinking, obsessional thinking, difficulties with impulse control, difficulty sleeping, difficulty keeping track of time, and agitation.” While this is a distressing litany of the symptoms to be expected from prolonged solitary confinement, it may be that al-Marri’s relative sanity compared to Padilla (who was described by his guards as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture'”) is sufficient to explain why his story has not been so newsworthy, but it seems likely that his case has also been largely ignored because he is a resident alien rather than a US citizen, and because his story is not so glamorous.

Unlike Padilla, who shot to undying fame when he was accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city, al-Marri has no such tag to identify him. The presidential order which declared him an “enemy combatant” stated simply that he was closely associated with al-Qaeda and presented “a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States,” and the “charges” against him have fluctuated: at various times it has been claimed by the government that he attended an al-Qaeda training camp, that he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-confessed architect of 9/11, and that he had connections to the al-Qaeda financier Mustafa al-Hawsawi. It has also been alleged that he met Osama bin Laden, and that, after meeting him, pledged that he would kill Americans, that he volunteered for a “martyr mission,” and that he was working as an al-Qaeda sleeper agent in the US at the time of his capture. Rather more prosaically, it was also alleged that he had documents related to jihadi activities on his computer, including information on hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical weapons), lectures by Osama bin Laden and a cartoon of planes crashing into the World Trade Center.

Crucially, however, none of these claims are necessarily reliable. As Jonathan Hafetz explained to me when I spoke to him on Friday (and as has been apparent since Newsweek reported on it in June 2003), most of the supposed intelligence against al-Marri came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in March 2003, just three months before al-Marri was upgraded from an alleged credit card fraudster to a major terror suspect. As I discussed at length in an article in July, “Gitmo’s Tangled Web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, Dubious US Convictions and a Dying Man,” KSM stated during his tribunal at Guantánamo in March this year that he had given false information about other people while being tortured, and, though he was not allowed to elaborate, I traced in my article several possible victims of these false confessions, including Majid Khan, one of 13 supposedly “high-value” detainees transferred with KSM to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist held in Guantánamo, and his son Uzair, who was convicted in the United States on dubious charges in November 2005, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

It’s possible, therefore, that al-Marri is another victim of KSM’s tangled web of tortured confessions, but whether or not this is true, the correct venue for such discussions is in a court of law, and not in leaks and proclamations from an administration that appears to be intent on holding him without charge or trial for the rest of his life. Since November 2005, when the administration dropped its “dirty bomb” allegations against Padilla and charged him with the far lesser crimes of “conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people in a foreign country, conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, and providing material support for terrorists,” for which he was convicted — pending appeal — in August this year, al-Marri has had the painful distinction of being the only US “enemy combatant” held on American soil.

The Padilla verdict caused outrage amongst those who were rightly concerned that the judge had forbidden all mention of the three and a half years that a US citizen had spent in mind-destroying isolation without charge or trial, but al-Marri’s case is, arguably, even more significant. Under the cover of his perceived second-class status as a resident alien rather than a US citizen, the administration appears to be hoping that the Fourth Circuit judges will endorse what Jonathan Hafetz described to me as “the most radical and far-reaching claim of the imperial presidency: that the President can seize any person in America and imprison him for life, without charge and without evidence, based solely upon his say-so.”

This, then, is why the news that al-Marri’s case was being scrutinized by the Fourth Circuit judges seized my attention so vigorously. While the Supreme Court will undoubtedly beckon if the verdict goes the government’s way, the Fourth Circuit judges are discussing an issue that should be of paramount importance to all Americans: their right not to be seized on a Presidential whim, and held forever without charge or trial.

It is, moreover, not the first time that the Fourth Circuit judges have looked at al-Marri’s case. In June, by a majority of 2 to 1, three judges in the Fourth Circuit appeals court delivered the following damning verdict on the President’s presumed ability to detain Americans (whether citizens or resident aliens) at will. “Put simply,” they declared, “the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants.'”

The judges had apparently been swayed by the arguments presented by Jonathan Hatefz and his colleagues, who insisted, as they have maintained all along, that the President “lacks the legal authority to designate and detain al-Marri as an ‘enemy combatant’ for two principal reasons”; firstly, because the Constitution “prohibits the military imprisonment of civilians arrested in the United States and outside an active battlefield,” and secondly, because, although a district court previously held that the President was authorized to detain al-Marri under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (the September 2001 law authorizing the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those involved in any way with 9/11), Congress explicitly prohibited “the indefinite detention without charge of suspected alien terrorists in the United States” in the Patriot Act, which followed five weeks later. Even more critically, Congress actually rejected a provision in a prior draft of the bill, which would have permitted the Attorney General to detain without charge any individual he “has reason to believe may commit, further, or facilitate acts [of terrorism],” insisting instead that suspects be charged “with a criminal offense or an immigration violation within seven days of their arrest” (that’s seven days, note, not 2155 days — as of November 5, 2007 — in solitary confinement).

The verdict in June — a triumph for those who realized how crucial the al-Marri case was — lasted only until the government appealed. Instead of three judges, the Fourth Circuit court has now convened en banc to reconsider al-Marri’s indefinite detention without trial, and this critical decision — a last bulwark, effectively, against the whims of a dictatorial President — now rests in the hands of nine judges in one of the most conservative courts in the land.

Unexpectedly, however, the signs are not all bad. As the New York Times explained, “based on the pointed, practical and frequently passionate questioning” during Wednesday’s hearing, the judges were “divided and troubled, and it was not clear which was the majority was leaning.” Some responses were predictable. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, for example, remarked that civil liberties groups had “stirred up needless anxiety” about the President’s powers. “We’re not talking about an indiscriminate roundup,” he said. “We’re talking about two people in six years [al-Marri and Padilla] with undisputed ties to al-Qaeda.” In response, however, Judge Robert L. Gregory stated that the case was one of “constitutional principle,” and a representative of the government, Gregory J. Garre, faced tough questions about the administration’s position. Judge M. Blane Michael asked, “How long can you keep this man in custody?” and when Garre replied that it could “go on for a long time,” depending on the duration of the “war” with al-Qaeda, Judge Michael stated, “It looks like a lifetime.”

Under questioning from Judge William B. Traxler Jr., who inquired about the circumstances required for holding people in secret detention, Garre blustered that al-Marri had been given an opportunity to rebut the government’s allegations, but had “squandered” the opportunity. This was not strictly true. Al-Marri had indeed been given an opportunity to face his accusers in court, but, as his lawyers pointed out, the burden was actually on the government to prove its accusations. “How is a person who is held incommunicado to challenge these things?” Judge Traxler asked, to silence from Garre.

With the judges’ overall opinions unclear, al-Marri, his lawyers, and all responsible American citizens will have to wait for the verdict to be announced, which could be before the end of the year. I can only hope that the judges have listened carefully to the arguments made by his lawyers. As Jonathan Hafetz explained to me, “Mr. al-Marri’s four-plus years of solitary confinement in a navy prison crosses a line that should never be crossed a civilized society, and cannot be accepted in a nation, like America, committed to basic human rights and the principles of its Constitution.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Last Wednesday, the Federal Reserve dropped its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 4.5 per cent citing ongoing weakness in the housing sector. As expected, the stock market rallied and the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up137 points. Unfortunately, Bernanke’s “low interest” stardust wasn’t enough to buoy the markets through the rest of the week.

On Thursday, the hammer fell. The Dow plunged 362 points in one afternoon on increasing fears of inflation, a slowdown in consumer spending, a steadily weakening dollar and persistent problems in the credit markets. By day’s end, the Fed was forced to dump another $41 billion into the banking system to forestall a major breakdown. This is the most money the Fed has pumped into the financial system since 9/11/2001 and it shows how dire the situation really is.

Why do the banks need such a huge infusion of credit if they are as “rock solid” as Bernanke says?

As most people now realize, the mortgage industry is on life-support. Many of the ways that the banks were generating profits have vanished overnight. The “securitization” of debt (mortgages, car loans, credit card debt etc) has ground to a halt. What had been a booming multi-billion dollar per-year business is now a dwindling part of the banks’ revenues. Investors are steering clear of anything even remotely associated to real estate.

Additionally, the banks are holding an estimated $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities and derivatives for which there is currently no market. This is compounded by $350 billion in “off balance sheets” operations — which are collateralized with dodgy long-term mortgage-backed securities — that provide funding for “short-term” asset-backed commercial paper. ASCP has shriveled by $275 billion in the last 10 weeks leaving the banks with gargantuan liabilities. Bernanke was forced to add $41 billion to keep the banking system from slipping beneath the waves. But that’s just a short-term fix. In the long run, the Fed has less chance of stopping the market from correcting than it does of stopping a runaway truck by standing in its path. Besides, the Fed cannot purchase the banks’ bad investments (CDOs, MBSs, or CP) nor can it reflate the multi-trillion dollar the housing bubble. All it can do is provide more cheap credit and hope the problems go away.

So far, the lower rates haven’t even decreased the price of the 30-year mortgage or made refinancing any cheaper. In truth, they’re just a desperate attempt to perpetuate consumer borrowing while the banks figure out how to offload their enormous debts. That’s what Paulson’s $80 billion “Banker’s Bankruptcy Fund” is really all about; it’s just the repackaging of subprime junk so it can be passed off to credulous investors. Fortunately, the public has wised up and isn’t buying into this latest fraud. As a result, the banks have taken another blow to their already-flagging credibility.

In the last two months, the pool of qualified mortgage applicants has contracted, as has the market for merger and acquisition deals (private equity). So the banks are probably doing more with the Fed’s $41 billion injection than just beefing up their reserves and issuing new loans. The market analysts at Minyanville.com summed it up like this:

“Banks are taking the liquidity the Fed is forcing out there through the discount window and repos. After using it to shore up the declining value of their assets, they have excess to lend out. Finding no traditional borrowers that want to buy a house or build a factory, the new rules the Fed has set forth allows the banks to pass this liquidity onto their broker dealer subsidiaries in much greater quantities. These broker dealers are lending thus to hedge funds and margin buyers who are speculating in stocks. Remember, the Fed is powerless unless it can find people to borrow the credit it wants them to spend. By definition, the last ones willing to take that credit are the most speculative.”

This is a likely scenario given the fact that the stock market continues to fly high despite the surge of bad news on everything from the falling dollar to the geopolitical rumblings in the Middle East. Last month, the Fed modified its rules so that the banks could provide resources to their off-balance sheets operations (SIVs and conduits). If the Fed is willing to rubber-stamp that type of monkey-business; then why would they mind if the money was stealthily “back-doored” into the stock market via the hedge funds?

This might explain why the hedge funds account for as much as 40 to 50 per cent of all trading on an average day. It also explains why the stock market is overheating.

The charade cannot go on forever. And it won’t. Rate cuts do not address the underlying problem which is bad investments. The debts must be accounted for and written off. Nothing else will do. That doesn’t mean that Bernanke will suddenly decide to stop savaging the dollar or flushing hundreds of billions of dollars down the investment bank toilet. He probably will. But, eventually, the blow-ups in the housing market will destabilize the financial system and send the banks and over-leveraged hedge funds sprawling. Bernanke’s low interest “giveaway” will amount to nothing.

Bloomberg News ran a story last week which sheds more light on the jam the banks now find themselves in:

“Banks shut out of the market for short-term loans are finding salvation in a government lending program set up to revive housing during the Great Depression. Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual Inc., Hudson City Bancorp Inc. and hundreds of other lenders borrowed a record $163 billion from the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks in August and September as interest rates on asset-backed commercial paper rose as high as 5.6 percent. The government-sponsored companies were able to make loans at about 4.9 percent, saving the private banks about $1 billion in annual interest.”

Whoa. So, now that the credit markets have frozen over, the banks are going to the government with begging bowl in hand? So much for “moral hazard”.

Commercial paper is short-term notes that businesses use for daily operations. Because much of this CP is backed by mortgage-backed securities the banks have been having trouble rolling it over. (Refinancing) So — unbeknownst to the public — various banks have been borrowing from the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB) so they can cut their losses (or stay afloat?) The FHLB has extended $163 billion of loans to them, which means that the risks that are inherent in supporting “dodgy banks that make bad bets” has been transferred to FHLB’s investors. The danger, of course, is that-when investors find out that FHLB is mixed up with these shaky banks, they are liable to sell their shares and trigger a collapse of the system.

Citi’s Woes

Over the weekend, Citigroup’s CEO Chuck Prince got the axe. Citigroup, which boasts more than 300,000 staff worldwide, has lost more than 20 per cent of its market value from bad bets in sub-prime mortgages. According to the Times Online: “The Securities and Exchange Commission may investigate whether it improperly juggled its books to hide the full extent of the problem.”

“Juggled” is not a word that is taken lightly on Wall Street where traders are now bracing for another sell-off of financial stocks. Mr. Prince is not alone in the unemployment line either. He’s be accompanied by Merrill Lynch’s former boss, Stanley O’ Neal who got the boot last week when his firm reported $8.4 billion in write-downs. Deutsche Bank analysts now predict that Merrill may write off another $10 billion of losses related to its portfolio of sub-prime debts. That would wipe out 8 full quarters of earnings and represent the largest loss in Wall Street history.

The news is bleak. The systemic rot is appearing everywhere presaging ongoing losses for the financial giants and a long-downward spiral for the markets. The banks are currently under-regulated, over-leveraged and under capitalized.

Former Fed chief Paul Volcker summarized the overall economic situation last week at the second annual summit of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In his speech he said:

“Altogether, the circumstances seem as dangerous and intractable as I can remember.Boomers are spending like there is no tomorrow. Homeownership has become a vehicle for borrowing and leveraging as much as a source of financial security.. As a Nation we are consumingabout 6 per cent more than we are producing. What holds it all together? – High consumption – high leverage – government deficits – What holds it all together is a really massive and growing flow of capital from abroad. A flow of capital that today runs to more than $2 billion per day.” The nation is facing “huge imbalances and risks.”

Volcker is right. The country is in a bigger pickle than any time in its 230 year history. The credit storm that was engineered at the Federal Reserve has swept across the planet and is now descending on commercial real estate, credit card debt, and the plummeting bond insurers industry. These are the next shoes to drop and the tremors will be felt throughout the broader economy.

As this article is being written, Reuters is reporting that Citigroup may be forced to write-down as much as $11 billion in subprime mortgage-related losses!

Reuters: “Citigroup announced today significant declines since September 30, 2007 in the fair value of the approximately $55 billion in U.S. sub-prime related direct exposures in its Securities and Banking (S&B) business. Citi estimates that, at the present time, the reduction in revenues attributable to these declines ranges from approximately $8 billion to $11 billion (representing a decline of approximately $5 billion to $7 billion in net income on an after-tax basis).”

Citigroup’s statement indicates a willingness on its part to come clean with its investors but, in fact, they know that the situation is fluid and there’ll be hefty losses in the future. Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) will continue to be downgraded as time goes by. According to the Financial Times, one banker was having so much difficulty getting a bid on subprime securities; he found the only way he could get rid of them was through “barter. He resorted to using a tactic more normally associated with third world markets than the supposedly sophisticated arena of high finance. ‘Barter is the only thing that works,’ he chuckled, ‘It’s like the Dark Ages'” The article continues:

“Never mind the fact that the risky tranches of subprime-linked debt have fallen 80 per cent since the start of the year; in a sense, such declines are only natural for risky assets in a credit storm. Instead, what is really alarming is that the assets which were supposed to be ultra-safe – namely AAA and AA rated tranches of debt – have collapsed in value by 20 per cent and 50 per cent odd respectively. This is dangerous, given that financial institutions of all stripes have been merrily leveraging up AAA and AA paper in recent years, precisely because it was supposed to be ultra-safe and thus, er, never lose value.” (Financial Times; Gillian Tett)

AAA and AA assets—the top-graded tranches— have already been downgraded by 20 per cent to 50 per cent! And the prices are bound to fall even more because there is no market for mortgage-backed securities. This is a bank’s worst nightmare; an asset that loses value and requires greater capital reserves every day. In fact, AAA rated MBSs have dropped 14 per cent in one month. It is truly, death by a thousand cuts.

The US financial system is now buckling beneath the weight of its own excesses. The subprime contagion—which can trace its origins to the expansion of credit at the Federal Reserve — has devastated the housing market generating an unprecedented number of foreclosures, record inventory, and a multi-trillion dollar equity bubble which is now deflating and wiping out much of the mortgage industry in its path. Its effects on the secondary market have been even more devastating where pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and foreign banks are left holding hundreds of billions of dollars of complex, mortgage-backed securities and subprime-related derivatives which are now destined to be downgraded to pennies on the dollar ravaging once-robust portfolios. The subprime meltdown has been equally damaging to myriad European investment banks and brokerage houses. We’ve seen a wave of bank closings in France, Germany and England which has left investors shell-shocked, triggering capital flight from American markets and supplanting confidence in the US financial system with growing suspicion and rage. Where are the regulators?

According to Bloomberg News, “European and Asian investors will avoid most US mortgage-backed securities for years without guarantees from government-linked entities creating an enormous drag on the US housing market”. Foreign investors believe they were hoodwinked by bonds that were deliberately mis-rated to maximize profits for the investment banks. This may explain why $882 billion has been diverted into Chinese and Indian stock markets in the last month alone.

The biggest losers of all, however, are the financial giants that created most of the abstruse, debt-instruments that are now devouring the system from within. The productive and “wealth creating” components of the economy have been subordinated to a finance-driven model which suddenly derailed due to the abusive expansion of debt. Inevitably, some of the banks that took the greatest risks will be shuttered and trillions of dollars in market capitalization will disappear.

Is it possible that anyone with a pulse and a minimal ability to reason couldn’t see the inherent problems of building a financial edifice on the prospect that millions of first-time homeowners with bad credit history and no collateral would pay off there mortgages in a timely and responsible manner?

No. It is not possible. The real reason that the subprime swindle mushroomed into an economy-busting monster is that the markets are no longer policed by any agency that believes in intervention. The pervasive “free market” ideology rejects the notion of supervision or oversight, and as a result, the markets have become increasingly opaque and unresponsive to rules that may assure their continued credibility or even their ability to function properly.

The “supply side” avatars of deregulation have transformed the world’s most vital and prosperous markets into a huckster’s shell-game. All regulatory accountability has vanished along with trillions of dollars in foreign investment. What’s left is a flea-market for dodgy loans, dubious over-leveraged equities and “securitized” Triple A-rated garbage.

Let’s hear it for the Reagan Revolution.

What is striking is how the new “structured finance” paradigm replicates a political system which is no longer guided by principle or integrity. It is not coincidental that the same flag that flies over Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib flutters over Wall Street as well. Nor is it accidental that the same system that peddles bogus, subprime tripe to gullible investors also elevates a “waterboarding advocate” to the highest position in the Justice Department. Both phenomena emerge from the same fetid swamp.

On the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General, anti-torture activists put on a fully realistic display of waterboarding at the entrance to the Department of Justice.

Iranian-born actor/activist Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, wearing an orange jumpsuit and hands bound, was dragged to an inclined board by interrogators dressed as “civilian contractors.” When he could not give the names demanded by his interrogators, a towel was placed over his face and gallons of water were poured over his head.

Dozens of reporters and cameramen pushed forward to capture the scene. Emerging from the experience coughing and shaken, Ebrahimzadeh told reporters that it was the most terrifying experience of his life, even though a piece of plastic behind the towel protected him from the full force of the water.

Introducing the demonstration, C. Clark Kissinger pointed out that media who describe waterboarding as “simulated drowning” are themselves practicing “simulated journalism.” He pointed out that waterboarding is universally understood to be torture, and the United States had even prosecuted as war criminals Japanese officers who had waterboarded U.S. prisoners of war.

Democracy for Pakistan was never the deal — and as Musharraf’s latest power grab throws his nation into turmoil, Bush will gladly go along.

Nov. 6, 2007 | In the fall of 1999, as he campaigned for the presidency, George W. Bush was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pakistan. Bush could not. He famously replied: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected — not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.” Although Bush didn’t know Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s name and was confused as to how he got into office, the soon-to-be American president was sanguine about the anti-democratic developments in Pakistan.

More than seven years later, Bush’s illusions about Musharraf — and any illusion of democracy in Pakistan — have been shattered by the dictator’s declaration of a state of emergency. Tantamount to a coup, Musharraf’s actions on Saturday have not only thrown Pakistan into turmoil but have also revealed the hypocrisy of Bush’s foreign policy, including the proclaimed goal of fostering freedom and the rule of law in the Muslim world.

At a press conference on Monday, Bush said of the weekend coup, “We expect there to be elections as soon as possible.” But while Bush admitted that Musharraf’s actions would “undermine democracy,” he insisted that the general is “a strong fighter” in the war on terror. That dual message was accompanied by the American president tepidly declining to say what he would do if Musharraf did not move toward elections. Also revealing was the fact that Bush had sent the weakest member of his team, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, out to warn Musharraf against the coup, indicating how little he was in reality worried about it. If he had been deeply anxious, he would have called the general himself. Many observers are viewing Musharraf’s coup as a major setback for Bush’s policy, but in fact it changes almost nothing.

Although the United States has given some $11 billion to Pakistan (mostly in military aid) since 2001, Bush needs Musharraf more than Musharraf needs the United States. The war in Afghanistan is a key reason: A major proportion of the war materiel for the 20,000 U.S. troops, and additional 20,000 NATO troops, in Afghanistan (a landlocked country) goes through Pakistan. U.S., British and Canadian troops on the front lines fighting a Taliban resurgence could be endangered if Pakistan were to cut off the flow of those supplies. On Monday, Rice appeared to back off from earlier warnings to Pakistan that a coup would jeopardize U.S. aid, saying that she doubted cooperation on the war on terror would be affected by Musharraf’s actions.

Musharraf, who was brought up in part in Turkey and is representative of the secular stratum of Pakistan’s middle class, is the Bush administration’s ideal ally. They point to his successes: Musharraf has moved a lot of fundamentalist officers out of positions of power, removing them from any authority over the country’s stockpile of nuclear bombs. Under his rule, Pakistani military intelligence has captured nearly 700 al-Qaida operatives in that country, including high-value figures such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. And Pakistani cooperation was key in breaking up a plot in summer 2006 by Britons of Pakistani heritage to blow up airplanes flying from London to New York.

But the 1999 interview revealed Bush’s true stripes regarding the Pakistani dictator, and his knee-jerk support for authoritarianism over democracy. Bush was criticized then for applauding the overthrow of the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif government in the Oct. 12, 1999, military coup. His spokesperson at the time, Karen Hughes, said that Bush was encouraged by Musharraf’s promise that he would hold early elections, restore “stability” to Pakistan, and ease tensions between India and Pakistan. (In fact, Musharraf had been a notorious hawk on India and may in part have carried out the coup because he saw his civilian predecessor as too dovish toward New Delhi.) What the world did not then know was that President Bill Clinton had negotiated a deal not long before with Prime Minister Sharif whereby Pakistan would deploy special operations troops to capture Osama bin Laden. When Musharraf took power in fall of 1999, he refused to honor the deal, since the operation was unpopular with the military’s fundamentalist officers. Indeed, Bush was supporting a man who derailed the best chance the Clinton administration may have had to prevent Sept. 11.

Countless academics have sought to measure the tangible benefits of being a union member. The difference between union and non-union wages, often referred to as the “union premium”, can be calculated in many different ways. It’s a profoundly complex field… here’s a classic example of the poop one has to wade through in search of enlightenment:

If heteroscedasticity is present and affects the coefficient estimates, the quantile regression estimation suggests that the rate of change of the unobservables is different at different quantiles for males but it is not the case for females.

Rightyho, then.

Strangely, international data on the union premium has never, to our knowledge, been assembled in an easily-accessible form. The most that we found was a list of 19 countries. No doubt there are good reasons for this, probably involving heteroscedasticity. Anyway, let’s start with a sample of five countries and then consider some of the issues.

The history of relations between the Black liberation movement and law enforcement has always been adversarial, at its best. At its worst, it is a history of murder, beatings, lies and frame-ups. There are few groups in this history that experienced the latter more than the Black Panther Party. The history of FBI and police harassment and intimidation of Panther members during the Party’s heyday is well documented. It includes the murders of several members, the constant harassment and petty arrests of members by local police forces and the framing of many of its leaders. Most of these frame-ups resulted in long prison terms for the members accused and convicted falsely.

What may be surprising to many who know this history is that these frame-ups continue today. It was under the FBI-Justice Department program known as COINTELPRO that the first frame-ups took place and it is under that program’s successors that other frame-ups have occurred. Two false convictions that received much of the publicity in the 1990s were those of Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba bin Wahad. Both of these men spent over fifteen years in prison for crimes they did not commit, thanks to frame-ups carried out under the auspices of the COINTELPRO program.

Two ongoing cases that appear to be frame-ups from this vantage point are those of Mumia abu Jamal and the San Francisco 8. The former is a case involving the murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981 and the latter involves the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971. In both situations, the prosecution’s case is based on evidence that is flimsy at best and just plain false at its worst. Neither prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt despite several chances. In addition, the politics of the defendants has been used by the prosecution in an attempt to prejudice the jury.

Mumia’s case has always carried the stench of a frame-up. The conflicting testimony of witnesses, the failure of witnesses to appear and many other instances of questionable conduct by the prosecution and law enforcement have conspired to create this perception. A recent book by Michael Schiffmannn titled Race Against Death (currently available only in German) adds even more documentary fuel to this perception. The text, which does a good job placing Mumia’s case into a historical context of racism in the United States, provides a history of the case itself and the movement that has grown in support of Mumia following the 1995 signing of his death warrant by then Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. The new material at the end of the book includes several never-before-published photographs of the 1981 crime scene that were also never produced in court. These photos raise more questions as to Mumia’s role in the events of that night the policeman was killed. The litany of miscues and missing evidence already familiar to those who have followed Mumia’s case around the world is repeated here, with a renewed emphasis. In addition to this evidence is the newly discovered fact that a fifth bullet fired by police at the scene for comparative purposes was “lost.”

The photos in Schiffmann’s text cast more doubt on the state’s case by apparently disproving the prosecution’s statements that Mumia stood over Officer Faulkner and fired at him several times. The photos show no marks from the bullets that were supposedly fired in this fashion. In fact, the sidewalk was not damaged in any way. Schiffmann goes on to write: “it is thus no question anymore whether the scenario presented by the prosecution at Abu-Jamal’s trial is true. It is clearly not, because it is physically and ballistically impossible.” (p. 205) The remainder of the photos show a scenario that constantly contradicts the testimony of officers and witnesses (apparently coerced) and the nature of the scene they described in Mumia’s original trial.

It is the continued refusal of the court to allow a new trial for Mumia that would allow the new evidence to be introduced that has been pointed to by Mumia’s supporters as part of the proof that not only was Mumia framed because of his politics and outspokenness as a member of the media, but that the frame-up continues. Added to this refusal by the court is the somewhat understandable desire of the slain officer’s family to have a perpetrator locked up, even that someone isn’t really the killer.

Other lesser known cases involving the US government and former Black Panther members are those of Veronza Bowers, Jr. and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). Bowers has been in prison for more than thirty years despite the fact that he is a model prisoner and has served his complete sentence under the law, been approved for parole only to have it overturned by the Justice department and is still in prison sixteen months after his sentence has expired.

Besides this travesty, the facts of Bowers’ conviction are questionable, to say the least. He was convicted of the murder of a U.S. Park Ranger based on the word of two government informers. Both of the informers received reduced sentences for other crimes in exchange for their testimony. There were no eye-witnesses, nor was there any other evidence to link him to the crime. Bowers’ alibi testimony was not credited by the jury and the testimony of two relatives of the informants who insisted that they were lying was not allowed. The informants had all charges against them in this case dropped. In addition, according to the prosecutor’s post-sentencing report, one was given $10,000 by the government.

As for Al-Amin, he was recently removed from state custody in Georgia by federal authorities and sent to the federal control unit in Florence, Colorado. No reason was given for the transfer, despite repeated requests from family and friends. According to the website maintained by the family and friends of the prisoner Dr. Mutulu Shakur, the transfer seems to be part of a more general move by the Bureau of Prisons to prevent programs that have had an “impact on the transformation of dozens of men, from a criminal mentality to liberation consciousness.” The transfers and other intimidation by the bureau seem intended to make it difficult for these prisoners to build networks of support. Other aspects of this campaign include the suspension of cultural and educational programs within the federal prison systems and the increased harassment of politically active prisoners.

As mentioned above, another ongoing case involving former Black Panthers and the government is that of the San Francisco 8. This case against eight former Panthers and Panther supporters charged with the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971 was thrown out of court in 1975 because the evidence used by the prosecution was obtained by torture. It was revived in the early part of the twenty-first century by the California attorney general with help from the US Justice Department. There seems to be no new evidence in the case, although the prosecution hints that some does exist. DNA taken from all of the defendants in 2005 failed to match any previous evidence and the prosecution has hinted that it will reintroduce the same evidence thrown out back in 1975 because it was extracted by torture. Evidence obtained by torture is not considered to be verifiable beyond a reasonable doubt precisely because it was obtained by torture.

Anybody following the current debate around the U.S. rendition program for terror suspects is quite familiar with the proven argument that torture does not produce credible evidence. Of course, if the purpose of the torture is something other than the procurement of credible evidence or confessions, than it doesn’t really matter as to its effectiveness.

In the case of the San Francisco 8, it appears that the prosecution was not so much interested in finding the people responsible for the killing of the San Francisco policeman in 1971 as it was interested in helping to destroy the already splintered Black Panther Party. As any student studying the COINTELPRO program can tell you, one of its primary goals was the destruction of the Panthers. This goal was pursued by a variety of means. Among them was murder, the spreading of false rumors concerning the members’ personal lives, the placing of snitch jackets on members, and the intentional framing of its members on felony charges.

The case of the San Francisco 8 falls under the latter category but is also unique if only because the entire case was based on police speculation and torture. None of the accused was ever found guilty of the murder the first time they were tried. After the torture was exposed in 1975, the prosecution’s case was thrown out. The men who were not in prison on other charges (of a questionable nature as well) returned to their communities and lived active and law abiding lives until 2005. In 2005, the Department of Homeland security revived the same case that had been discarded in 1975. Together with the State of California they convened a grand jury and called many of the same defendants to testify. To their credit, the men refused and served time for their refusal. In 2006, DNA was extracted from the men by the prosecution in the hope that this evidence could be tied to evidence from the 1971 crime scene. After more than a year of silence, the defense was told that none of the DNA samples matched any of the evidence. Despite this, the prosecution refuses to drop the case and appears to be intent on resubmitting the evidence obtained under torture back in the early 1970s despite the earlier court’s refusal to allow that same evidence. Randy Montesano, the attorney of Harold Taylor–one of the defendants-told the media after a motion to deny admission of the torture-extracted evidence that despite the refusal of the court to approve the motion “there is no way to get a fair hearing today, especially given the delay of so many years and (because) the passage of time alone precludes any reliable adjudication ­ so we will ultimately prevail.”

One respects Mr. Montesano’s optimism, yet it can not be emphasized enough that this case may not go the way it should (and the defense hopes it will) unless the light of the world is shown upon it. It will take the concerted effort of a popular movement to insure that the men known as the San Francisco 8 are not framed for the murder of the policeman in 1971. The alternative for these men would be spending the rest of their lives in prison, much like the future faced by Mumia abu Jamal. In fact, it is the growing popular movement supporting the San Francisco 8 that helped convince the judge in the case to lower the bail of most of the men and allow them to go home to their loved ones. Likewise, in the case of Mumia abu Jamal, it is the popular movement around his case that has kept him alive.

The geographic state of the United States is pretty clearly a rogue empire at this point. We violate the nonproliferation treaty by building new, more powerful weapons and then make up stories about others who are not violating the treaty. We torture, and our democratic controlled senate judiciary committee is about to confirm someone for attorney general who doesn’t seem to know what torture is when he sees it.

We invade other countries for their oil, which is a war crime. We continue to ignore global warming and the Kyoto treaty. We won’t even sign the land mine treaty, so that innocent children don’t lose their legs and arms. Jeezus, we won’t even take care of our own working class children when they get sick.

But you say to yourself, this is not the views of Americans, we Americans are better than that.

Well, the new Zogby International Poll will set you straight.

“A majority of likely voters – 52% – would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and 53% believe it is likely that the U.S. will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the next presidential election, a new Zogby America telephone poll shows.

The survey results come at a time of increasing U.S. scrutiny of Iran. According to reports from the Associated Press, earlier this month Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran of “lying” about the aim of its nuclear program and Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of “serious consequences” if the U.S. were to discover Iran was attempting to devolop a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration also announced new sanctions against Iran. “

Yes, according to this poll, every other person on the street is willing to bomb a country that has not attacked us, has made no threats against us and has denied that they are building a nuclear bomb. It has allowed their enrichment activities to be monitored by the UN, who then reports that they are not building a bomb. The country has not even started a war of aggression since maybe the old testament. (They do have oil though, and a lot of natural gas).

Our own Intelligence Agencies have falsely interpreted the words of their leaders from Farsi to English to say that they “will wipe Israel, “the country”, off the face of the map” when a far more fair translation would say that the “regime will be removed from the pages of time.”

As bad and as disheartening as this poll is, there is a thin sliver of a silver lining.

And that is, it used to be higher.

Yes, hard to imagine, but in 2006, 57% of Americans were willing to brutally murder innocent woman and children from the air with our bombs… all based on a kind of hysteria that makes me understand why both political parties are in their own version of a fist off.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post reports that:

“The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

SAY WHAT?

We just used tactical nuclear weapons under the cover of Israeli jets to illegally bomb a country that has not threatened us and has in fact helped us torture innocent Canadians.

In the meantime, everyone knows that the mega weird nuclear weapons foul up by the Air Force requires too much rubber in your brain to get your mind around the kookie concocted story that was given by the Pentagon after the Military Times took the lid off and broke the story.

There is some serious s#it happening.

And the Rogue Empire lumbers on.

With a declining currency,

and a global policy and posture of

might over right,

and lies over light.

Someone asked me yesterday about where they should keep their investments, and I told them to not ask me today because they might not get the response they expect.

For they that sow the wind,

Over 30 anti-war protestors at Morton West High School in Berwyn face expulsion for a demonstration at the school on Thursday. Scores of Students Face Expulsion Due to Sit-in Berwyn, IL

Sign the petition.

Over 70 students participated in a sit-in against the Iraq War on All Saint’s Day, Thursday, November 1st. It began third hour when dozens of students gathered quietly in the lunchroom at Morton West High School and refused to leave. The administrators and police became involved immediately and locked down the school for a half hour after class ended. Students report that they were promised that there would be no charges besides cutting classes if they took their protest outside so as not to disturb the school day. The students complied, and were led to a corner outside the cafeteria where they sang songs and held signs while classes resumed.

Despite a police line set up between the protestors and the student body, many other students joined the demonstration. Organizers say they chose November first because it is the Christian holy day called the feast of All Saints and a national day of peace. They wrote a letter and delivered it to Superintendent, Dr. Ben Nowakowski who was present at the time, stating the reason for their protest.

Deans, counselors and even the Superintendent tried to change the minds of a few, mainly those students with higher GPA scores to abandon the protest. The school called the homes of many of the protestors. Those whose parents arrived before the end of school and took their students home, or left before the protest ended at the final bell, received 3-5 days suspension. All others, an estimated 37 received 10 days suspension and expulsion papers. Parents report that Nowakowski stated those who are seventeen will also face police charges.

Parents who are frantically trying to spare their child’s expulsion flooded the school yesterday to file appeals on the matter. So far, Superintendent Nowakowski has held firm on the punishments. They are expected to find out the results of the appeals on Tuesday. Parents and students report and the school’s videotape shown to some of the parents confirms that the students were non-violent in their action.

The protest came on the heels of a recent incident on October 15th, when a student reported hearing that another student had a gun on campus. The story of the eyewitness was deemed unreliable and the school was not locked down. Later that week (October 19), the Berwyn police, acting on a tip arrested one of the youths originally questioned for gun possession and he allegedly confessed to carrying an unloaded semi-automatic handgun that day. All these issues, plus the expected announcement of whether uniforms will be established in the school should make the next Board of Education meeting on Wednesday at 7:00pm at the Morton East campus very well-attended.

See the link below for the Superintendent’s statement on the matter:
www.jsmortonhs.com/news/contentview.asp

For letters or phone calls of support, please see information below:

Dr. Ben Nowakowski, Superintendent
District 201
2423 South Austin, Cicero, IL 60804
bnowakowski (at) jsmorton.org

(708) 222-5702

Mr. Lucas, Principal
Morton West High School
2400 S. Home Ave.
Berwyn, IL 60402
jlucas (at) west.jsmorton.org

708-222-5901

Mr. Jeffry Pesek, President
Board of Education, District 201
3145 South 55th Avenue
Cicero, IL 60804

708-802-1863

For the rest of the Board Members see:
www.jsmortonhs.com/board/default.asp

For parent contact:
Pam Winstead 708-749-3163 , pwinstead (at) clearchannel.com

Alma Moran 708-717-4202 , qtalmita (at) yahoo.com

Adam Szwarek 847-587-8849 , tsq9743 (at) aol.com

Students Threatened With Expulsion after Morton West Sit-in
04 Nov 07

Nineteen Morton West High School Students were threatened with expulsion after staging a sit-in to protest the Iraq War. You can read more about the event here: http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/80059/index.php
We are urging all student and community organizations to protest the excessive actions taken by the school administrators and to give us permission to attach your organization’s name to the petition below. In order to have your organization placed on the petition, please contact me at cbrenz@gmail.com.

————-

In Defense of the Morton West Students

We are writing in defense of the nineteen students who now face excessive disciplinary actions at the hands of various Morton West school administrators. Our sympathies lie with the courageous and moral struggle that the students have taken up, and with their parents who still support them. The struggle for a peaceful and just society absent of war should not be met with punishment, but should be supported by the community as a whole, especially from within the educational setting. Furthermore, It is our firm belief that an injury to freedom for students anywhere is an injury to freedom for students everywhere. This is why we urge all Morton West administrators to drop all disciplinary action against the said students, and to remove any indications of said events from their permanent records.

Columbia College Chicago Students for a Democratic Society

Agricultural policy is not sexy. You probably don’t know the intricacies of “loan deficiency payments” or “base acreage,” and you probably don’t care. This was once an agrarian nation, but now there’s a less than 1% chance that you’re a farmer, and if you are, you’re probably part time; the average farm family gets 82% of its income from nonfarm sources. We’re not a people of the soil anymore, and for most of us, our eyes glaze over when we see farm statistics like the ones in that last sentence.

But farms still cover most of our land, consume most of our water and produce most of our food. If you eat, drink or pay taxes–or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation–U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.

It’s also a horrible deal. It redistributes our taxes to millionaire farmers as well as to millionaire “farmers” like David Letterman, David Rockefeller and the owners of the Utah Jazz. It contributes to our obesity and illegal-immigration epidemics and to our water and energy shortages. It helps degrade rivers, deplete aquifers, eliminate grasslands, concentrate food-processing conglomerates and inundate our fast-food nation with high-fructose corn syrup. Our farm policy is supposed to save small farmers and small towns. Instead it fuels the expansion of industrial megafarms and the depopulation of rural America. It hurts Third World farmers, violates international trade deals and paralyzes our efforts to open foreign markets to the nonagricultural goods and services that make up the remaining 99% of our economy.

Ever since the 1980s, when a wave of foreclosures inspired those iconic Farm Aid concerts, the media’s sporadic reports from farm country have tended to focus on floods, droughts and other disasters. But the farm crisis is as over as Barbara Mandrell. Farm incomes are at an all-time high. The median farmer enjoys five times the net worth of the median nonfarmer household. Crop prices have soared–thanks largely to the Federal Government’s promotion of corn ethanol over more efficient renewable energies–and yet subsidies have as well.

Nevertheless, Congress is finalizing a $286 billion farm bill that will continue our basic farm policies, which means it will keep funneling money to farmers and pseudo farmers through a bewildering array of loans, price supports, subsidized insurance, disaster aid and money-for-nothing handouts that arrive when times are tough–or not tough. “What a joke,” grumbles Congressman Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat who led a failed bipartisan reform effort in the House. “You’re eligible as long as you’re breathing.” Actually, that’s not quite true. Since the vast majority of the cash goes to five row crops–corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice–more than 60% of our farmers receive no subsidies. And a recent Government Accountability Office report identified $1.1 billion of subsidies whose recipients were no longer breathing.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration started farm aid in response to the Dust Bowl and the Depression, calling it “a temporary solution to deal with an emergency.” But in Washington, the emergency has never ended. The government still gives farmers your money–more than ever over the past decade–along with research projects to expand their yields, restoration projects to clean up their messes, flood-control and irrigation projects to protect and enhance their land, visa programs to supply them with cheap labor, ethanol mandates and tariffs to boost their prices, and tax breaks by the bushel.

The bipartisan farm bills that Congress passes every five to seven years reflect the power and savvy of the farm lobby, which parlays cue-the-violins stereotypes of struggling yeomen into giveaways to the planter class of the South and Great Plains. In reality, the top 10% of subsidized farmers collect nearly three-quarters of the subsidies, for an average of almost $35,000 per year. The bottom 80% average just $700. That’s worth repeating: most farmers, especially the small farmers whose steadfast family values and precarious family finances are invoked to justify the programs, get little or nothing.

This summer an unprecedented coalition, running the gamut of the advocacy world from rural development to health to business to the environment, emerged to help Kind and Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona try to shake up the system. Editorials thundered for reform, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco–the city of organic kale and “meat is murder”–vowed to deliver it. The moment seemed ripe for Democrats to challenge the status quo. Agribusiness was steering two-thirds of its campaign donations to Republicans, and just 19 of the 435 congressional districts were vacuuming up half of all subsidies. Still, House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota had a warning for Kind. “I told him, ‘Ron, you’re a good guy, but you’re way out of your league here,'” Peterson told TIME. “I knew we were going to kick his butt.”

He was right. Pelosi sided with the American Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union and the Big Five commodity lobbies, spearheading a bill she called “a first step toward reform,” an oblique way of saying it isn’t reform at all. The Big Five would still hog the subsidies, while the influential sugar industry would retain its lucrative price supports. The one major “reform” was that farm families earning at least $2 million a year would supposedly be ineligible for subsidies, assuming none of them knew decent accountants.

The story of this butt-kicking is a quin-tessential Washington tale, illustrating how a single special interest with a single-minded devotion to a cause can trump a broad coalition and the national interest. The Senate is considering a similar bill, and a reform effort led by Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana seems likely to meet a similar fate. The Bush Administration has made noises about a veto; Kind says the President, famously reluctant to admit mistakes, confided in a private chat that he regrets signing the lavish 2002 bill. But it’s never wise to bet against the farm lobby, which spent $135 million on lobbying and donations last year and brilliantly portrays opponents as enemies of the heartland of America. “The game is always the same,” says Oxfam America’s Jim Lyons, a former U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary. “The big commodity groups have a stranglehold on policy. And there’s not a lot of stomach for new ideas.”

‘Look What’s Happened.’

OUR CULT OF THE SMALL FAMILY FARMER dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who hailed humble “cultivators of the earth” as America’s “most valuable” and “most virtuous” citizens. Politicians still paint American Gothic portraits of the country folk who toil in the soil to grow our food and fiber. But at the Husker Harvest Days farm show in September in Grand Island, Neb., it was clear how far American agriculture had come from the days when Cornhuskers husked corn by hand.

The farm show looked like a state fair but felt like an industry expo, with barkers urging visitors to increase productivity or cut costs rather than ride a pony or eat corn dogs. John Deere salesmen showed off their largest machinery ever, including a 530-horsepower tractor and a combine that costs $410,000 fully equipped. At the Firestone tent, a rep said the company is preparing a 91-in. (230 cm) farm tire, taller than Yao Ming. TopCon Precision Agriculture exhibited GPS gadgets that adjust your spraying and watering according to the topography of your fields and can even steer your tractor. ADM Financial advisers showed how to hedge risk in futures markets, while a lecturer at Monsanto’s Biofuture tent touted drought-tolerant corn: “We’re in a brand-new world here, folks! You’ve got to get more production out of every acre just to keep up!”

Jefferson’s “cultivators of the earth” didn’t have genetically engineered seeds or 530-horsepower tractors. They had 1-horsepower horses. And they didn’t have subsidies either. In fact, most antebellum farmers opposed all federal aid to private enterprise, assuming it would just enrich manufacturing élites. The lesson of Husker Harvest Days is that modern farmers–at least the ones with most of the land and subsidies–are a new manufacturing élite. They just happen to be manufacturing food and fiber. Production agriculture is a high-tech, globalized business with economies of scale. You don’t buy a $410,000 combine to farm the back 40.

But it’s hard to start big, which is why agriculture has the kind of demographics that cancels sitcoms: only 6% of farmers are younger than 35, while 26% are over 65. “It’s damn near impossible to get started today,” Craig Ebberson says during a tour of the endless rows of corn and soybeans he farms with his sons near Randolph, Neb. “Farms are getting bigger and more efficient, and that’s not going to stop.” The Environmental Working Group’s farm-subsidy database shows that Ebbersons in the area collected $3 million in crop aid over the past decade. Craig used that money to snap up more land, expand his feedlot, invest in a nearby ethanol plant and buy gizmos that track his fertilizer and pesticide use and the food and drug intake of every cow. It’s no accident that agriculture’s productivity growth consistently outpaces the rest of the economy–or that farms with million-dollar revenues are the fastest-growing agricultural sector. “We started with a corn knife and a scoop shovel, and look what’s happened,” he chuckles.

What’s happened is, some farm families got big, but more got out. Subsidies have helped finance the expansion plans of the big guys while inflating the rents of the little guys. Ebberson’s neighbor Mike Korth has a 1,000-acre (400 hectare) corn and soybean spread that would have been considered enormous a century ago but is now about average for the area. His township has only 39 families on 36 sq. mi. (94 sq km), a frontier-level population density. No wonder a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study found the rural counties most dependent on subsidies had the worst population losses and the weakest job growth.

“We’re killing what made America great,” says Korth, an intense 50-year-old who looks like a miniature Mike Ditka. Randolph’s school district has dwindled from nearly 1,000 students to fewer than 400. It’s adopted a four-day week to save money and might switch to eight-man football. The town has lost its Ford, Chevy and Chrysler lots, all its implement dealers and lumber yards, its creamery, jewelry store and movie theater. “The big farmers took over, and it’s killed small business,” says Paul Loberg, who runs a welding shop off Main Street. “All they need downtown is coffee and beer. They can’t buy that by the truckload yet.”

Subsidies aren’t the only cause of expansion, but they do “wed farming regions to an ongoing pattern of economic consolidation,” concluded the Kansas City study. Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs found the 2002 farm bill–the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act–spent six times as much on subsidies for the state’s top 20 farmers as on rural development programs for the 20 counties losing the most population. And the South’s cotton and rice farmers get even fatter checks than Middle America’s grain farmers, which is why Korth managed to persuade the Nebraska Farm Bureau to endorse limits on payments to rich farmers, even though the national Farm Bureau aggressively opposes them. “Wealth has a natural tendency to concentrate,” says Chuck Hassebrook, the center’s director. “But why reinforce that? Shouldn’t government try to offset that?”

Modern agroindustrialists are perhaps even more admirable than the modest ploughmen of yore. They’re still family farmers who like to play in the dirt–only 2% of our farms are corporate-owned–but they also have to be land managers, soil scientists, hydrologists, veterinarians, mechanics, commodity traders, exterminators, meteorologists and highly sophisticated businessmen. The question is, Why do they need our help when they’re doing so well? Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, a former Nebraska farm boy who is running for Senate, put it this way in an interview hours before he announced his resignation: “Congratulations! We celebrate your success. You don’t need subsidies anymore!”

An Imperfect System

IN JEFFERSON’S DAY, 9 OUT OF 10 Americans cultivated the earth. When Abraham Lincoln created the U.S. Department of Agriculture, half the country still farmed. He once said farmers were “neither better nor worse than any other people,” just “more numerous.” (They also received inordinate political flattery, “the reason of which I cannot perceive, unless it be that they can cast more votes.”) Under F.D.R., 1 in 5 Americans was still a farmer.