///Taking the Illusions Out of History-I would like to be able to love my country and justice///

Friday, January 03, 2003

What are they hiding?
Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
By Adam Clymer
New York Times

Friday 3 January 2003

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 -- The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.

Some of the Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings, were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration's drive for greater domestic security. Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney's battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority of the executive branch, senior administration officials say.

Some of the changes have sparked a passionate public debate and excited political controversy. But other measures taken by the Bush administration to enforce greater government secrecy have received relatively little attention, masking the proportions of what dozens of experts described in recent interviews as a sea change in government openness.

A telling example came in late 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the new policy on the Freedom of Information Act, a move that attracted relatively little public attention.

Although the new policy for dealing with the 1966 statute that has opened millions of pages of government records to scholars, reporters and the public was announced after Sept. 11, it had been planned well before the attacks.

The Ashcroft directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no "foreseeable harm" from the release.

Generally speaking, said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, while secrecy has been increasingly attractive to recent administrations, "this administration has taken it to a new level."

Its "instinct is to release nothing," Professor Brinkley said, adding that this was not necessarily because there were particular embarrassing secrets to hide, but "they are just worried about what's in there that they don't know about."

The Bush administration contends that it is not trying to make government less open. Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said, "The bottom line remains the president is dedicated to an open government, a responsive government, while he fully exercises the authority of the executive branch."

Secrecy is almost impossible to quantify, but there are some revealing measures. In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as "Secret" -- the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.

In Congress, where objections to secrecy usually come from the party opposed to the president, the complaints are bipartisan. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat first elected in 1974, said, "Since I've been here, I have never known an administration that is more difficult to get information from." Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said things were getting worse, and "it seems like in the last month or two I've been running into more and more stonewalls."

Mr. Cheney says the Bush policies have sought to restore the proper powers of the executive branch. Explaining the fight to control the task force records to ABC News last January, he said that over more than three decades: "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. We saw it in the War Powers Act, we saw it in the Anti-Impoundment Act. We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that the presidents cough up and compromise on important principles. One of the things that I feel an obligation on, and I know the president does, too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."

Mr. Bush has made similar comments. But the more relevant history may have been in Texas, where Mr. Bush, as governor, was also reluctant to make government records public. Confronted with a deadline to curb air pollution, he convened a private task force to propose solutions and resisted efforts to make its deliberations public. When he left office, he sent his papers not to the Texas State Library in Austin, but to his father's presidential library at College Station. That library was unable to cope with demands for access, and the papers have since been sent to the state library.

Framing an Argument

One argument underlies many of the administration's steps: that presidents need confidential and frank advice and that they cannot get it if the advice becomes public, cited by Mr. Cheney in reference to the task force and by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in explaining the administration's decision to delay the release of President Ronald Reagan's papers.

Mr. Gonzales said "the pursuit of history" should not "deprive a president of candid advice while making crucial decisions."

Some administration arguments are more closely focused on security. Mr. Ashcroft has said that releasing the names of people held for immigration offenses could give Al Qaeda "a road map" showing which agents had been arrested.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has threatened action against Pentagon officials who discuss military operations with reporters, said before troops at the Army's Special Operation Command on Nov. 21, 2001, "I don't think the American people do want to know anything that's going to cause the death of any one of these enormously talented and dedicated and courageous people that are here today."

The critics argue more generally. Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, argues that secrecy does more harm than good. The Central Intelligence Agency's exaggerated estimates of Soviet economic strength, for example, would have stopped influencing United States policy, Mr. Moynihan said, if they had been published and any correspondent in Moscow could have laughed at them.

"Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision-making," Mr. Moynihan said, and plays to the instincts of self-importance of the bureaucracy.

Mary Graham, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, saw two major risks in this administration's level of secrecy.

"What are often being couched as temporary emergency orders are in fact what we are going to live with for 20 years, just as we lived with the cold war restrictions for years after it was over," Ms. Graham said. "We make policy by crisis, and we particularly make secrecy policy by crisis."

Moreover, she said, it ignores the value of openness, which "creates public pressure for improvement." When risk analyses of chemical plants were available on the Internet, she said, people could pressure companies to do better, or move away.

Mr. Fleischer contends that there is no secrecy problem. "I make the case that we are more accessible and open than many previous administrations -- given how many times [Secretary of State Colin L.] Powell, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have briefed," he said.

Asked if there was anyone in the administration who was a consistent advocate of openness, who argued that secrecy hurt as well as helped, Mr. Fleischer said President Bush was that person. He said that was exemplified by the fact that while "the president reserved the authority to try people under military tribunals, nobody has been tried under military tribunals."

In the cases of Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, he said, Mr. Bush has opted for the more open and traditional route of the criminal justice system.

Shielding Presidents

The Bush administration's first major policy move to enforce greater secrecy could affect how its own history is written.

On March 23, 2001, Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel, ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from Ronald Reagan's presidency that scholars had requested and archivists had determined posed no threat to national security or personal privacy. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were to become available after Jan. 20, 2001, twelve years after Mr. Reagan left office. Mr. Reagan's administration was the first covered by the 1978 law.

The directive, which also covered the papers of Mr. Reagan's vice president and the president's father, George Bush, was to last 90 days. When Mr. Gonzales extended the sealing period for an additional 90 days, historians like Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University attacked the delays, saying they were designed to prevent embarrassment and would nullify the records law's presumption of public access to those documents.

On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued an even more sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents like his father, or representatives designated by them or by their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges: "military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president's advisers," according to the order.

Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president's claim of privilege. Now he cannot.

The order was promptly attacked in court and on Capitol Hill. Scott L. Nelson of the Public Interest Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters, maintaining that the new order allowed unlimited delays in releasing documents and created new privileges to bar release.

House Republicans were among the order's sharpest critics. Representative Steve Horn of California called a hearing within a few days, and Representative Doug Ose, another Californian, said the order "undercuts the public's right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past." The order, Mr. Horn said, improperly "gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records."

On Dec. 20, the White House sought to silence the complaints by announcing that nearly all the 68,000 pages of the Reagan records were being released. Legislation introduced to undo the order never made it to the House floor, where leaders had no interest in embarrassing the president. And a lawsuit challenging the order languishes in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Historians remain angry. Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, said, "This order of Bush, we feel it's a disgrace -- what it means is if this policy applies, they can hold presidential documents close to the vest in perpetuity, the way Lincoln's papers were held by the family until 1947."

Battling the Congress

The administration's most publicized fight over secrecy, and its biggest victory to date, has come over its efforts to keep the investigative arm of Congress from gaining access to records of the energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.

This fight is only the showiest of many battles between the Bush administration and members of Congress over information. Such skirmishes happen in every administration. But not only are they especially frequent now, but also many of the loudest Congressional complaints come from the president's own party, from Republicans like Senator Grassley and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.

The vice president framed the fight as being less about what the papers sought by the General Accounting Office might show than over power -- what Congress could demand and how it could get it or what essential prerogatives the executive branch could maintain, especially its ability to get confidential advice. And he welcomed the battle. In an interview the day before the suit was filed, he said. "It ought to be resolved in a court, unless you're willing to compromise on a basic fundamental principle, which we're not." And on Dec. 9, Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court ruled for the vice president.

Judge Bates ruled that David M. Walker, who as comptroller general heads the General Accounting Office, had not suffered any personal injury, nor had he been injured as an agent of Congress, and therefore the suit could not be considered. An appeal is all but certain to be filed, but for the time being, the administration clearly has a victory.

"Vice President Cheney's cover-up will apparently continue for the foreseeable future," said Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who pressed Mr. Walker to act, hoping to find evidence of special interest favoritism for Republican donors in the Cheney documents.

There have been other bitter fights over disclosure between the White House and the Congress. While the Democrats controlled the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the chairman, James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, repeatedly threatened last year to subpoena the Environmental Protection Agency for documents explaining the scientific basis and potential impact of its proposed air pollution rule changes requiring aging power plants to install new pollution controls when their facilities are modernized. Mr. Jeffords, who never got around to issuing the subpoena, argued that the administration had broken its promises of cooperation.

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was infuriated last August when the Justice Department said it would send answers to some of his questions about how it was using the USA Patriot Act to the more pliant Intelligence Committee, which was not interested. Mr. Sensenbrenner threatened to issue a subpoena or "blow a fuse."

Mr. Grassley, the incoming chairman of the Finance Committee, said administration obstruction required him to go and personally question government officials working on Medicare fraud cases, instead of sending his staff. But his new chairmanship and the Treasury confirmations before it may give him a lever. He said he told a White House aide of his problems and asked, "How can I get a presidential nominee through if I have to be spending my time doing things my investigators could be doing?"

Closing the Courtroom

Legal policy is where the administration's desire to maintain secrecy has excited the most controversy. Since the first few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has insisted on a rare degree of secrecy about the individuals it has arrested and detained.

The immigration hearings held for hundreds of people caught in sweeps after the bombings have been closed to relatives, the news media and the public.

The names of those detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been kept secret, along with details of their arrests, although on Dec. 12 the Justice Department told The Associated Press there had been 765 of them, of whom only 6 were still in custody.

A few dozen individuals have been held as material witnesses, after the Justice Department persuaded federal judges that they had information about terrorism and might flee if released. Neither their names nor the total number of them have been made public.

The administration has also kept a tight lid on the identities of the military detainees being held at Guantánamo, Cuba. But in considering how to deal with them, in military tribunals, the government has moved away from secrecy. When Mr. Bush directed the Defense Department in November 2001 to set up military tribunals to try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, one reason cited was the ability to hold those proceedings in secret, to protect intelligence and to reduce risks to judges and jurors. But when the rules were announced in March, they said "the accused shall be afforded a trial open to the public (except proceedings closed by the presiding officer)."

While the government's policy in the immigration cases has suffered some judicial setbacks, appeals and stays have allowed it to remain in effect.

Fundamentally, the government has argued against opening hearings by contending that they would make available to terrorists a mosaic of facts that a sophisticated enemy could use to build a road map of the investigation, to know what the government knew or did not know, and thus to escape or execute new attacks.

That argument was also made in the main case involving releasing the names of those detained, where the government also maintains that the Freedom of Information Act's right to privacy would be violated by a release of the names.

Legal scholars have objected particularly to the decision to close all the immigration hearings, rather than parts of them. Stephen A. Schulhofer, a professor at New York University Law School, said there was already a legal provision for closing a hearing when a judge was shown the necessity.

The "road map" explanation seemed implausible, Mr. Schulhofer said, because the detainees had a right to make phone calls, in which "a real terrorist could alert cohorts who would not have known he was detained."

At a recent seminar at Georgetown University Law School, Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said protecting privacy was the main reason for suppressing the names. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, dismissed that rationale, asking Mr. Chertoff, "How can you even say that with a straight face?"

So far, the government has won challenges to the detention of material witnesses.

On releasing the names, it lost in a Federal District Court here, but appeared to have impressed two of the three appeals court judges who heard the case in November.

On the question of a blanket closing of "special interest" immigration hearings, an appeals court in Cincinnati ruled against the government in August and one in Philadelphia ruled in its favor in October. The Supreme Court is likely to be faced with choosing between them.

Putting Sand in the Gears

Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, governments at all levels feared that information they made publicly available could be useful to terrorists, and began moves to curtail access, a trend the Bush administration encouraged.

The first of the strictures on information resulting from Sept. 11 were described by Ms. Graham, the Brookings and Kennedy School scholar, in her book, "Democracy by Disclosure" (Brookings Institution Press, 2002).

"Officials quickly dismantled user-friendly disclosure systems on government Web sites," she wrote. "They censored information designed to tell community residents about risks from nearby chemical factories; maps that identified the location of pipelines carrying oil, gas and hazardous substances; and reports about risks associated with nuclear power plants."

Many of those withdrawals mirrored efforts industry had been making for quite a few years, arguing that the public did not really need the information. Some information has been removed from public gaze entirely. James Neal, the Columbia University librarian, said that officials of libraries like his around the country that serve as depositories for federal information "have some concern about the requests to withdraw materials from those collections." Perhaps even more important, Mr. Neal said, was that "we also do not know what materials are not getting distributed."

Some material that has been removed from Web sites is still available, though obviously to fewer people, in government reading rooms. The chemical factory risk management plans cited by Ms. Graham are no longer available through the Internet, said Stephanie Bell, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency. But individuals can look at up to 10 of them and take notes (but not photocopies) in 55 government reading rooms around the country, Ms. Bell said. There is at least one reading room in every state except Maine, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Last March the Defense Department issued a draft regulation concerning possible limits on publication of unclassified research it finances and sharp restrictions on access by foreign citizens to such data and research facilities.

This prompted some concerted resistance from scientists. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who heads the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, told the academy's annual meeting on April 29:

"I am worried about a movement to restrict publication that has been proceeding quietly but quickly in Washington. Some of the plans being proposed could severely hamper the U.S. research enterprise and decrease national security. It is being suggested that every manuscript resulting from work supported by federal funds be cleared by a federal project officer before being published, with serious penalties for violations. Another rule could prevent any foreign national from working on a broad range of projects."

Even though the department withdrew its proposal and officials say there has been no decision on whether to try again, the scientists say they are still worried.

The new Ashcroft directive on Freedom of Information requests has also begun to be felt. A veteran Justice Department official said he believed that fewer discretionary disclosures were being made throughout the government because "as a matter of policy, we are not advocating the making of discretionary disclosures."

Delays are one clear reality. The General Accounting Office reported last fall that "while the number of requests received appears to be leveling off, backlogs of pending requests governmentwide are growing, indicating that agencies are falling behind in processing requests."

To Thomas Blanton, who helps run the National Security Archive, which collects and posts documents gained through Freedom of Information Act, that is a clear effect of the Ashcroft order.

"What these signals from on high do in a bureaucracy, they don't really change the standards," Mr. Blanton said, "but they put molasses or sand in the gears."





Go To Original

Killing the Messenger: Layoff-Poll Funds Cut
David Lazarus
Chronicle Business Columnist

Friday 3 January 2003

The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies.

The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health.

There's still plenty of economic data available charting employment trends nationwide. But the mass-layoffs stat comprised an easy-to-understand overview of which industries are in the greatest distress and which workers are bearing the brunt of the turmoil.

"It was a visible number," said Gary Schlossberg, senior economist at Wells Capital Management in San Francisco. "In times like these, it was a good window on how businesses were cutting back."

No longer. But then, businesses cutting back didn't exactly jibe with the White House's recent declarations that prosperity is right around the corner.

You had to look pretty hard just to learn that the mass-layoffs stat had been scotched. No announcement was made by the Labor Department, and no prominent mention of the change was posted at the department's Web site.

In fact, news of the program's termination came only in the form of a single paragraph buried deep within a press release issued on Christmas Eve about November's mass layoffs.

It simply said that funding for the program had dried up and that the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics was unable to find an alternative source of funding.

No doubt as intended, the announcement slipped by virtually unnoticed. Even state officials were surprised to learn of the demise of what they called an important, if downbeat, barometer of the nation's economy.

Sharon Brown oversaw compilation of the mass-layoffs number at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. She was pleased to blow her agency's horn.

HIGH-QUALITY PROGRAM

"This was a high-quality program, producing timely information on important developments in the labor market," Brown said.

According to the bureau's final monthly report, U.S. employers initiated 2,150 mass layoffs in November, affecting 240,028 workers. A mass layoff is defined as any firing involving at least 50 people.

California by far had the most employees given the boot -- 62,764, primarily in administrative services. Wisconsin was a distant second with 15,544, followed by Texas with 14,624.

Between January and November, 17,799 mass layoffs were recorded and nearly 2 million workers were handed their hats by businesses.

Brown said that because of a bureaucratic quirk, the $6.6 million in annual funding for the mass-layoffs program -- money primarily doled out to state officials to gather relevant data -- was channeled through the Labor Department's Employment & Training Administration.

FUNDING ELIMINATED

When that agency decided it needed more cash to handle its own affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was told to look elsewhere for its budget needs.

Apparently no extra money was to be found anywhere within the Labor Department, which had a total budget of $44.4 billion last year, up from $39.2 billion in 2001.

"With very finite discretionary resources, we have to make difficult decisions," said Mason Bishop, the Labor Department's deputy assistant secretary for employment training. "We didn't see how this program was helping workers re-enter the workforce."

Coincidentally, the same conclusion was reached in 1992 when the first President Bush canceled the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program amid election-year charges that he had bungled handling of the economy.

REVIVED BY CLINTON

The program was resuscitated two years later by the Clinton administration.

Now Bush Jr. is following in his father's footsteps, once again deciding that the American people have no real need to know how many mass layoffs are made each month.

"It's questionable what value this program has for workers," insisted Bishop.

On the other hand, the Labor Department this week released a sweeping study of volunteer work over the past year, reporting that 59 million Americans donated their time and know-how to helping others.

President Bush has spoken repeatedly about the virtues of volunteerism since taking office in 2000.

VOLUNTEERISM MEASURED

During his own stint in the White House, Bush Sr. was a proud advocate of community service. That was also the last time the Labor Department was told to devote its finite discretionary resources to a study of volunteer work by U.S. citizens.

Then, as now, it's difficult to see how feel-good surveys of volunteer activities contribute to an understanding of the economy's vitality or the re-employment of displaced workers.

There does seem to be merit, though, in easily seeing how many people have received pink slips as companies tighten their belts, and which states and industries are in facing the greatest challenges.

"The United States economy is growing again," Bush declared in a holiday radio address from his Texas ranch. "This economy is strong and it can be stronger."

And if not, best to just sweep the whole mess under the rug.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


© : t r u t h o u t 2002


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:33 PM

Illigitimate President and his siblings are a "crew."

Another suspect deal, another Bush brother in the mix
By ROBERT TRIGAUX, Times Business Columnist
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 3, 2003


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The new year begs for a fresh start. But business accusations of international bribery, nefarious investors and a Bush brother awkwardly involved in a troubled company all have a too-familiar ring.

Here's the latest Robert Ludlum-style financial spat.

Former investors in South Florida's Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. recently filed a $60-million lawsuit accusing majority shareholders IAT Group and Palestinian chairman Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh of paying bribes to buy the banana and pineapple produce company in 1996 at a "ridiculously low price." The company denies wrongdoing.

Marvin Bush, the brother of President Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, joined the board of directors of Fresh Del Monte in 1998, after the alleged events took place. Marvin Bush was re-elected to the company's board this year for a term ending in 2005, and served on the board's critically important audit and compensation committees.

In October, Bush decided to resign from the board at the end of 2002. Without any public notice of Bush's planned departure by Fresh Del Monte, news of his pending resignation was not reported until last month.

Marvin Bush resigned for "personal reasons," according to Fresh Del Monte. In fact, he has resigned most of his board memberships, including Houston's HCC Insurance Holdings.

Fresh Del Monte, controlled by Abu-Ghazaleh's IAT Group, is based in the Cayman Islands but operates from headquarters in Coral Gables. It was a spinoff from the food giant Del Monte. Though the two companies bear similar names, they are no longer affiliated.

Why should we care about such corporate intrigue? Because Fresh Del Monte is a major Florida company employing thousands. Because the allegations of corruption in this investor lawsuit span national borders and are particularly slimy. Because Fresh Del Monte happens to be one of the largest tenants at Port Manatee, annually importing millions of boxes of fruit, just south of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

Because after such a year as 2002, questionable corporate conduct is under a harsher-than-ever spotlight. And because the Bush brothers' track record as directors of troubled companies is gaining legendary status. As brief reminders:

-- At Harken Energy in Texas in the mid 1980s, director George W. Bush sold shares of company stock just ahead of Harken reporting bad financial news to the public. Bush also failed as an insider to report his sales to federal stock regulators on a timely basis. That controversy hindered Bush's leadership last year when he urged corporate America to show more ethical leadership.

-- At Jacksonville's Ideon Group, a credit-card marketer, real estate developer Jeb Bush joined a board in 1995 that paid directors $50,000-plus a year, a record sum at the time in Florida. Ideon CEO and Bush fan Paul Kahn earlier had held a fundraiser for Bush's 1994 campaign for governor (Bush lost that one). Kahn even wrote to Jeb's father, former President George Bush, to tell him "how happy we are to have your son, Jeb, on our board of directors." By 1996, Kahn was out, Ideon was a financial disaster and Ideon directors faced multiple shareholder lawsuits. The company was later sold.

-- At Colorado's Silverado Savings & Loan, Neil Bush served as a director of an S&L whose chief would be sentenced to 31/2 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to stealing $8.7-million from investors. Though Bush never was charged with criminal wrongdoing, he agreed to pay $50,000 in 1992 to settle a civil lawsuit by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. As for Silverado, its collapse cost U.S. taxpayers a whopping $1-billion.

Which brings us back to current allegations that the acquisition of Fresh Del Monte six years ago was rigged, and the timing of the recent exit by director Marvin Bush and fellow outside director Stephen Way.

BB&T Capital Markets analyst Heather Jones, who tracks Fresh Del Monte, finds it curious Bush seems to have bowed out at the first whiff of investor trouble. "It's not in Bush's interest to be on the board with this high profile litigation, given his relationship to the president, so I would think it played some role," Jones told the Miami Daily Business Review.

Maybe Marvin Bush, who is financially savvy enough to manage hedge funds in Virginia just outside the nation's capital, finally learned from history. Unlike his brothers, he chose to get out while the getting was good.

In the Fresh Del Monte lawsuit, Miami lawyer Andres Rivero represents seven Mexican investors who held about 8 percent of Fresh Del Monte's shares. Rivero says IAT Group bought Fresh Del Monte for $120-million even after adviser Lehman Brothers had final bids of up to $275-million, and an initial public offering of 35 percent of the company drew $312-million a year after the sale. Rivero is asking for a jury trial in Florida.

Why? Because the lawsuit claims IAT and Abu-Ghazaleh in 1997 bribed Eduardo Bours, who chaired a Mexican government-affiliated investment group that controlled Fresh Del Monte, to accept the lowball offer by giving him $321,000 after the sale. A deposit of $321,000 was made to a Bank One account controlled by Bours in Tucson, Ariz.

Fresh Del Monte is fighting the lawsuit. Bours, who is Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, candidate for governor in the state of Sonora, denies any wrongdoing and says the payment was a legitimate bonus paid for his work as a CEO of the Mexican investment group.

The lawsuit calls the buyout "one of the great corporate swindles of all time."

Now that's a stretch, even if the lawsuit proves true. After the business shenanigans of 2002, any antics involving the sale of a South Florida banana grower will have to be underhanded indeed to top today's corporate swindles list.

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.


© Copyright 2001 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:54 PM

Sunday, December 29, 2002

The Season Of Giving For Corporate Welfare
Post-Election Holiday Handouts Abound

Mark Engler, a writer based in Brooklyn, has previously worked with the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in San José, Costa Rica, as well as the Public Intellectuals Program at Florida Atlantic University.


Who says that our current government in Washington, D.C. is filled with hard-hearted grinches? When it comes to handouts for corporate sponsors, it is the politicians' season of giving.

Senator John McCain has described the U.S. political process as "a system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion." The months immediately following an election provide a chance to see this system at its most cynical and transparent. Knowing that the national political culture suffers from a prolonged case of attention deficit disorder, politicians can make a safe bet that whatever disgraceful favors they do for special interests now will be long-forgotten by the general public before the next elections roll around.

More than just sending money, energy companies provided a lush talent pool for top administration positions.



For well-heeled donors, now is the time for the big payback. Between further tax cuts for the rich and legislation crafted by corporate lobbyists, they will have plenty to look forward to in coming months. In fact, returns on their political "investments" have already begun to come in. Members of Congress and President Bush made good use of the lame duck session to reward major contributors from the business community, in particular big energy and pharmaceutical companies.

Energy companies and other industrial polluters received one of the biggest gifts under the Christmas tree -- sent directly from the Bush administration. During the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when few reporters were paying attention, the EPA announced the largest rollback of the Clean Air Act in its 22 year history. New EPA rules allow factory owners higher emissions of carbon monoxide and other smog-causing pollutants, and weaken previous clean-up requirements.

The fact that El Paso Energy Corporation and Union Pacific rest high on the list of top soft money donors to the Republican party no doubt encouraged the EPA's pro-industry change of heart. More than just sending money, energy companies provided a lush talent pool for top administration positions. First and foremost, there's ex-Halliburton chief Dick Cheney. Fellow cabinet members Don Evans and Gayle Norton, plus National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, all have direct ties to energy industry brand names like British Petroleum, Chevron, and Tom Brown, Inc.

While the new EPA guidelines allow these corporations to reap millions in savings, under-represented citizens and the environment pay the price. Frank O'Donnell of the Clean Air Trust points to a survey indicating that 34 states plus the District of Columbia already have serious -- and in most cases worsening -- smog problems.

"It is deplorable that the Bush administration would weaken clean air protections and subject us to even bigger health problems," O'Donnell says. "Children with asthma, senior citizens and others with breathing problems are suffering the most."

Big drug companies were a second early beneficiary of post-election handouts. Their gift came stealthily wrapped as an amendment to the Homeland Security Act. This rider protects the makers of vaccine preservatives from lawsuits charging that their drugs cause autism in children. Given that the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Inc. and Eli Lilly together contributed over $3.6 million in soft money to Republicans during the 2001-2002 election cycle, few expected that the pharmaceutical industry would receive a lump of coal in its stocking this year. But even many Senate Republicans were shocked by the callousness of the House-generated amendment.

Shaming politicians as they make corporate payouts is one part of the solution to this bribe-and-bank political process.



That the Bush administration did not join in protest was hardly surprising, however, given that White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels formerly worked for Eli Lilly, the primary beneficiary of the legislation. Even more outrageous, Lilly CEO Sidney Taurel sits as a Bush appointee on the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

The drug amendment is one example of "tort reform" -- limitations on the amount of money that individuals who are injured by negligence or malpractice can collect from a company. Since insurance and tort lobby groups poured $5.7 million in soft money into GOP coffers in 2001 alone, more of these changes are almost certainly on their way. Ron Bonjean, spokesman for Sen. Trent Lott, says that "Tort reform is a priority for the Senate Republican leadership and will most likely be a focus of the 108th Congress."

Is there an end to corporate welfare in sight? No. The cost of competing in elections continues to skyrocket. George W. Bush alone spent over $185 million dollars on his last campaign. Recent limits on soft money contributions notwithstanding, candidates will continue to turn to networks of big donors to make up the colossal sums they need to win.

Shaming politicians as they make corporate payouts is one part of the solution to this bribe-and-bank political process. Surely, in the coming months, public scrutiny will be necessary to limit some of the most offensive giveaways. Of longer term significance is the fight for far-reaching campaign reforms. Measures that mandate public financing for political races -- like the "clean election" laws in Arizona, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine -- serve to institutionalize popular outrage over abuses that otherwise fade quickly into distant memory.

The sad fact is that over the next two years, almost all of us will forget the most recent round of political favors for big business. But the corporate donors won't. Come Christmas 2004, the payback season will begin anew.


Click here to subscribe to our free e-mail dispatch and get the latest on what's new at TomPaine.com before everyone else! You can unsubscribe at any time and we will never distribute your information to any other entity.






Published: Dec 24 2002











accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:24 PM

Justice Department Attorneys' Conduct to Be Investigated
Washington Post

Thursday 26 December 2002

Federal judge criticizes the lawyers for letters mailed to plaintiffs in a class-action suit filed on behalf of 300,000 Native Americans.

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge this week ordered a court ethics panel to investigate six Justice Department attorneys for their conduct in a landmark class-action suit against the government that seeks billions of dollars and was filed on behalf of more than 300,000 Native Americans.

In a 20-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth also blocked the Interior and Justice departments from continuing to send mass mailings to the Indian plaintiffs that include a provision that would terminate the Indians' rights to claim damages, even as the lawsuit continues.

Lamberth already has held three Cabinet officials in contempt of court for their failures in Indian trust fund reform, including Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton. His most recent order in the 6-year-old case, signed late Tuesday, said government attorneys failed to ask for the court's permission to send the notices to more than 1,100 plaintiffs.

That was a clear violation of rules governing attorney conduct, he wrote, and referred the issue to the disciplinary panel of U.S. District Court here.

"The court ... is at an utter loss to understand why defendants thought this court would consider it acceptable for them to include language [in the letters] that extinguishes the very rights that are the heart of this class-action litigation," he wrote.

The court's Committee on Grievances, which investigates allegations of misconduct, could dismiss the case or issue a range of sanctions.

"It's just astonishing," said Keith Harper, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, who is helping to represent plaintiffs. "They communicated with our clients in violation of court orders, even when the issue was pending before the judge."

Calls to the Justice Department's press office were not returned. In court motions filed earlier, attorneys had said they did not think they were required to inform the court about the letters.

Jon Wright, a spokesman for the Interior Department, declined to comment.

The Indian plaintiffs are seeking a full historical accounting of the Individual Indian Monies trust fund, a sprawling series of accounts started in 1887 when the government forced Indian tribes off 90 million acres of their land.

In return, they and their heirs were granted royalties from the sale of oil, gas, timber, mineral and other rights on an additional 11 million acres.

The fund now generates more than $500 million a year to at least 300,000 account holders, although so many records have been lost or incompetently kept over the decades that the government is unable to provide an accurate history for a single account.

The Indians filed suit in 1996, claiming the government owes them at least $10 billion in lost or missing funds.

But in October, with the trust fund under Lamberth's oversight, the government sent out 1,100 notices to trust fund account holders, claiming that enclosed statements were full and accurate historical accounts.

The data would be "final and cannot be appealed" unless the recipient filed a challenge within 60 days, the note said.

The Interior and Justice departments were planning to send an additional 14,235 historical accounts when Lamberth blocked the move this week.

The attorneys Lamberth referred for investigation are Assistant Atty. Gen. Robert D. McCallum Jr., as well as Stuart E. Schiffer, J. Christopher Kohn, Sandra P. Spooner, John T. Stemplewicz and Cynthia L. Alexander.

Lamberth's order says that any other attorneys, either from Justice or Interior, who participated in the mailings also should be investigated.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


© : t r u t h o u t 2002


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:02 PM

ZNet | Race

A Whole Lott Missing
Rituals Of Purification And Racism Denial

by Paul Street; December 22, 2002

The most disturbing aspect of the recent national melodrama over Senate Majority Leaders Trent Lott’s offensive declaration of retrospective support for the race-segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond is not the content of Lott’s remarks. The really depressing thing is what the entire episode says about the superficial level at which racism is discussed in the United States. A related downer is how it is working to stick America’s head yet further in the sand on the question of race.


The Deeper Racism
The main problem here is a failure to distinguish between two different levels of racism – overt and covert. The first variety has a long and sordid history in the US. It includes the burning of black homes and churches, the open public use of racial slurs and epithets, occupational bans, lynching, disenfranchisement, denial of prominent public roles to black individuals, restrictive real estate covenants, rock-throwing and “nigger”- screaming mobs, and open legal segregation of public facilities. Concentrated especially though but not exclusively in the South, level-one’s racism’s archived images and sound bites serve as background for ritual mainstream expressions of support for the ideals of the civil rights movement like the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. Consistent with his long record of racist comments and affiliations, Lott’s popularity among southern whites and his latest segregationist slip are certainly proof that there is still some life in this old racist dog, especially down in Dixie.

Still, this type or level of racism is largely defeated in the US. In post-Civil Rights America, the Republican Party makes sure to pack their convention stage with an abundance of black speakers and nearly every corporate and college brochure is loaded with images of racial “diversity.” No aspirant to public office dares question the nation’s official commitment to racial equality and equal opportunity. Prominent public media business and political figures play with fire when they are perceived as embracing the explicit racial bigotry and legal segregation of the past. Witness the case of Lott, held up for massive public ridicule because he indirectly embraced segregation in terms that are mild compared to the public rhetoric common among southern white politicians twenty years after Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign. Nowadays even David Duke has to claim that he is not anti-black and George W. Bush’s White House contains two blacks in prominent foreign policymaking positions – something that would never have occurred in pre-Civil Rights America.

The second level of racism is deeper and more intractable – as King and the Civil Rights Movement learned when they came north in 1966. It involves societal, structural and institutional forces and processes in ways that “just happen” to produce and perpetuate deep black disadvantage in multiple related areas of American life. It includes widespread persistent de facto residential and school segregation by race, rampant racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping of black schools, disproportionate surveillance, arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more. It is enabled, encouraged and even conducted by institutional and political actors, including some African-Americans, who would never publicly utter racially prejudiced comments and who not uncommonly declare allegiance to the ideals of the civil rights movement.

This second variety of racism has more than simply survived or outlasted the explicit, public racism of the past. It is ironically and perversely deepened by civil rights victories and the discrediting of open bigotry insofar as these elementary triumphs encourage the illusion of racism’s disappearance and the related notion that the only barriers left to African-American success and equality are internal to the black community.


New Age Racism: “We Made the Corrections, Now Get On With It”
Why are African-Americans twice as likely to be unemployed as whites? Why is the poverty rate for blacks more than twice the rate for whites? Why do nearly one out of every two blacks earn less than $25,000 while only one in three whites makes that little? Why is median black household income ($27,000) less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000)? Why is Black families’ median household net worth is less than 10 percent that of white? Why are blacks much less likely to own their own homes than whites? Why do African-Americans make up roughly half of the United States’ massive population of prisoners (2 million) and why are one in three young black male adults in prison or on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the American criminal justice system? Why do African-Americans continue in severe geographic separation from mainstream society, still largely cordoned off into the nation’s most disadvantaged communities thirty years after the passage of civil rights fair housing legislation? Why do blacks suffer disproportionately from irregularities in the American electoral process, from problems with voter registration to the functioning of voting machinery? Why does black America effectively constitute a Third World enclave of sub-citizens within the world’s richest and most powerful state?

Convinced that racism is no longer a significant barrier for blacks because there are African-Americans in high policy positions and serving as anchors on the Six O-Clock News, most whites find answers to these questions inside the African-American community itself. If serious racial disparities persist, if black continue to live both separately and unequally, white America and even some privileged blacks (e.g. John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute) think, its because of their own choices and because too many blacks engage in “self-sabotaging” and related “separatist” behaviors. “As white America sees it, “ note Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, (2000), “every effort has been to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they’re on their own.”

Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. “No place that I’m aware of,” wrote the respondent, “makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections – get on with it.”

Tell it to Lakisha Washington America has made the necessary racial “corrections” and now its time for blacks “to get on with it?” Tell it to the black job applicants of Boston and Chicago.

In a field experiment whose results were released last week, researchers Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhill Mullainathan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent out 5,000 resumes in response to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. Each resume was randomly assigned either a very black-sounding name (such as “Lakisha Washington” or “Jamal Jones”) or a very white-sounding name (such as “Emily Walsh” or “Brendan Baker”). This racial “manipulation,” the researchers found, “produced a significant gap in the rate of callbacks for interviews.” White names received roughly 50 percent more callbacks than black names. For white applicants, moreover, sending higher quality resumes increased the number of callbacks by 30 percent. For black names, higher-quality resumes elicited no significant callback premium.

Just “get on with it?” Tell it to black families trying to buy a home or rent an apartment in the Denver area. According to a report released last month by the U.S. Department of Housing, nearly 1 in 5 blacks trying to buy a home or rent an apartment there faces some kind of technically illegal discrimination, being diverted from white majority areas to communities predominantly populated by minorities. This was actually below with the national average (21.6 percent for blacks), determined through hundreds of matched-pair testing exercises conducted across the country.

Tell it to the roughly astounding one in three black men in the US now carry the lifelong mark of a felony criminal record thanks to the nation’s 30 -year binge of incredibly racially disparate surveillance, arrest and mass imprisonment (“corrections” indeed!) conducted under the auspices of the drug war. They generally experience no real wage increases in their twenties and thirties, when American men without felony records typically experience rapid earnings growth. In a recent academic study conducted by Northwestern University sociologist Devah Pager in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the possession of a prison record reduced the likelihood of white testers being called back by a prospective employer by a ratio of 2 to 1. Among black testers, the mark of a prison record reduced that likelihood by nearly 3 to 1.

“We’ve made the corrections?” Tell it to the very disproportionately black students of the nation’s highly and increasingly segregated urban public schools. They receive educational resources vastly inferior to those enjoyed by children in affluent white suburbs, thanks to the nation’s racist and regressive reliance on local property taxes to fund “public schools” whose operation and outcomes resonate with the long reach of private privilege and related racial inequality.

The products of these inferior schools become all-too easy fodder – human raw material for the nation’s prison industrial complex and racist mass incarceration lobby, which works to divert public dollars from education to pay for the construction and maintenance of yet more not-so “correctional” facilities. Those prisons create jobs and economic development for predominantly white rural prison towns even while the experience of incarceration pushes most black-ex-offenders yet further into the margins of the disastrous inner-city market for poorly educated workers.

The list of these sorts of disparate and not-so “color blind” policies is long and depressing. The problems experienced by the people and communities on their receiving end have little to do with explicit racial bigotry (public or private). It has much to do with what sociologist Joe Feagin calls “a system of racialized structural and institutional subordination that excludes blacks from full participation in the rights, privileges, and benefits of society.” What he refers to as “state–of–mind racism” and open racial bigotry has declined appreciably in the last four decades. But “state-of-being,” that is institutional, structural and systemic racism have not declined and may actually have become more deeply entrenched, despite and perhaps even, ironically enough, in part because of civil rights victories.


Pardoning Presidential Racism The deeper level racism’s army of practitioners and apologists is large and bipartisan, far bigger than the likes of Trent Lott. Leading soldiers include people not normally associated with racism under the terms of the dominant public discourse in the US, which focuses on the level one variety. Take, for example, former President Bill Clinton, sometimes referred to as “America’s First Black President.” Clinton, who spoke with reverence about King, counted former National Urban League President Vernon Jordan as a close friend and placed five African-Americans in his cabinet, was no bigot. Not surprisingly, he Clinton called for Lott to step down because of his insensitive remarks.

As President, however, America’s most racially sensitive President never worked seriously to address the dismantling of affirmative action in the United States. He betrayed his election promise to address the health care needs of impoverished African-Americans, failing to seriously push for a national health care program that would have provided crucial support the nation’s most truly disadvantaged. He led the charge for “free trade” legislation that furthered the replacement of black workers by cheaper overseas labor. He gave lip service to black education but did nothing to improve funding for disproportionately poor black schools or to advance school desegregation so that black kids could attend more privileged schools. He signed a vicious, victim-blaming welfare “reform” bill that played on the racist myth of inner-city Black women as morally bankrupt Welfare Queens to force hundreds of thousands of African-American single mothers into the super-exploited margins of the American labor market. This bill removed millions of black children from medical coverage, making them pay for their mothers’ alleged insufficient appreciation of the capitalist work ethic. Clinton passed repressive crime legislation that significantly expanded the remarkable over-surveillance, arrest and incarceration of African-Americans for nonviolent crimes in the name of a War on Drugs that is really a war on young black males.

During all this, in a classic expression of what the brilliant author and activist Elaine Brown calls “New Age Racism,” Clinton lectured blacks on the need to heal themselves and take personal and collective responsibility for overcoming the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It was and is a sentiment shared among many whites across the partisan board.

Or take George W. Bush, who boasts a number of black cabinet members, leads all Presidents except Clinton in naming women and minorities to political appointments, counts African-Americans among his intimate associates and has denounced Lott’s comments as “contrary to the spirit of this country.” Like Clinton, Bush rejects the notion that the US government owes black Americans even an apology for the crimes and legacy of slavery. He appointed as US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who opposes affirmative action and shares Bush’s enthusiasm for the racially disparate death penalty and racist mass incarceration fueled by the War on Drugs. He pushed through an education “reform” that punished minority schools that fail to raise student test scores but does nothing to reform the nation’s regressive, racist school funding system or address the savage re-segregation of American schools documented by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. At the same time, Bush embraces private school voucher plans that will only worsen the under-funding and segregation of the nation’s schools – problems that particularly affect black kids.

He is strictly opposed to national health care, of course. His version is of welfare “reform” is harsher than Clinton’s, expanding work requirements but denying significant job assistance in a time of recession and insidiously suggesting that moral laxity in the form of single-parenthood are the real cause of black poverty. Bush has spearheaded monumentally regressive tax cuts and launched an historic expansion of imperial “defense” expenditures that combined to limit desperately needed (especially by poor blacks) social programs while making the disproportionately white rich richer and the disproportionately black poor poorer. He as refused to extend unemployment benefits for the nations’ disproportionately black jobless; 800,000 Americans without work are scheduled to lose their benefits on December 28th (Happy Holidays). He spearheaded a “faith-based” initiative that gives federal funding to religious groups that provide social services without requiring compliance with anti-discrimination laws. He shares Clinton’s tendency to lecture blacks on the need to take responsibility for their own plight while embracing “free trade” and prison-filling “get-tough on crime” policies that make it yet more difficult for disadvantaged blacks to make it in America. Owing his Presidency in part to racist felony disenfranchisement laws and other race-based voting rights problems in Florida, Bush used 9-11 as a pretext to assault civil liberties (always a special concern for the black community) at home and to divide Americans yet further along lines of class and race.


“Changing One Horse for Another”

Or look at the records of those who were considered most likely to replace Lott as Majority Leader – Bill Frist (T-Tenn), a close Bush ally, Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma), Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania). Each of these Senators receive an ‘F’ from the NAACP for their recent voting history. In the last Congress, they voted for school vouchers, against raising school spending, for Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax cut, against strengthening the federal response to hate crimes, against managed care health reform, for the nomination of Ashcroft and against funding for bilingual education and (surprise) restoring ex-felons’ voting rights. No wonder that civil rights movement veteran and US Representative John Lewis (D-Georgia) remarked that the Senate Republican Party would respond to the Lott fiasco by “just … changing one [racist] horse for another [racist] horse.”

Lott’s successor, Frist, has voted against community technology centers for minority neighborhoods, sanctions for predatory lending, the expansion of minority higher education credits, increasing global funding to address the AIDS crisis in Africa, alternative voting verification methods and strong community investment requirements for banks. He has voted for decreasing voter registration through the purging of voting rolls and harsher juvenile criminal justice measures. A former surgeon with $25 million of stock in his family’s for-profit hospital chain and a recipient of massive campaign largesse from the pharmaceutical industry, Frist has led the effort to deny serious health care reform to the nation’s poorest citizens. He sponsored pharmaceutical giant Eli-Lily’s campaign to win federal protection (strangely included in the recent Homeland Security bill) from lawsuits by parents of children who developed autism as a result of faulty child vaccines.

How offensive, then, it was to see the Chicago Tribune’s editorial writers recently laud Frist as a “southerner who has no unsavory history on racial issues” and has “distinguished himself for his work on health care issues” (CT, 21 December, 2002). The Tribune applauded Frist’s “longstanding practice of traveling to Africa every year to work as a medical missionary” – ministering perhaps to some of the millions of Africans who are effectively denied access to life-prolonging AIDS drugs by American drug companies protecting their patent monopolies in the name of “free trade.” Such are the perverse racial sensibilities of New Age Racism, whereby the defeat of level-one racism obscures and provides cover for the disease’s deeper variant, which is most efficiently spread by policymakers who know enough to sell their policies and values as “color-blind” and consistent with the principles of King.


Another Dangerous Opportunity for White Racial Self Congratulation


For those who like to think that racism has been swept into the dustbin of American history, it is comforting to see the heavily white-led and white-supported Republican Party drum their own Senate Majority Leader out of office because of his “intemperate remarks.” The harsh reality missing from “mainstream” (really corporate) media accounts is that the party’s post-Lott downfall agenda is the same and as fundamentally racist as the one before his “gaffe.” Lott was removed from Republican leadership because his breach of good taste threatened to take the color-blind veneer off the deep racism at the heart of the party’s assault on affirmative action, civil rights legislation, and social democratic public policy in general. As an article recently posted on The Black Commentator (www.blackcommentator.com) noted, “Lott had to go in order to maintain the momentum of the GOP’s assault on affirmative action and civil rights leadership.”

In this regard, it is interesting to note how much more forceful top Republicans were than leading national Democrats in calling for Lott’s demotion. The latter undoubtedly hoped to run against a party stuck with a publicly exposed racist in a leadership position. Such a target promised to help them continue to garner the lion’s share of the black vote. It also promised to divert attention from their own heavy involvement in the deeper covert and systemic racism that envelopes this nation from top to bottom. Such is the persistent and tragic reality of race in an age when white America loves to congratulate itself for dropping racial slurs from acceptable public discourse, outlawing lynch-mobs, letting blacks sit in the front of the bus, and claiming to honor the legacy of King.

The most depressing and distressing thing about the Lott fiasco is the way it is providing white America yet another dangerous opportunity to pat itself on the back for advancing beyond the primitive state of level-one racism while digging the hole of the deeper racism yet deeper.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Street is Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League. His articles and essays have appeared in Z Magazine, Monthly Review, the Journal of American Ethnic History and Dissent. He is the author of The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002), which can be viewed at www.cul-chicago.org .


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:38 PM

Fiat=dictat

A Confederacy of Cronies
Ruling by corporate fiat is no way to run a democracy.

George Packer
November/December 2002

Character matters, Bill Clinton's critics asserted in the far-off years of his administration. It was true then -- even after his congressional enemies turned it into a self- fulfilling prophecy -- and it still is. What defines his successor's political character more than anything is not intellectual shortcomings or inherited privileges, but the fact that well into his 40s he had no experience other than in business. The last president of whom something similar could be said was Herbert Hoover. But Hoover was a businessman in the 19th-century sense -- he made his fortune in the wide-open field of mining engineering in far-flung posts around the world, and he was a true believer in laissez-faire individualism. He also retained a turn-of-the-century Progressive's idea of public service and became an international hero after World War I by coordinating the effort to feed the starving across Europe. What destroyed him after he became president in 1929, wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, "was not a sudden failure of personal capacity but the collapse of the world that had produced him and shaped his philosophy."

The world that produced George W. Bush did not collapse in 2002, but it trembled and revealed the flawed foundation beneath his -- it can't be called a philosophy, but it amounts to a set of unexamined assumptions about his world. And what is that world, what are those assumptions?

Too much ridicule of a fake-populist strain is heaped on Bush's pedigree; being the scion of aristocrats would be the best thing about him if only that tradition hadn't decayed and lost its noblesse oblige. He's neither an individualist in the Hoover grain nor an enlightened patrician like Theodore Roosevelt. What made Bush is crony capitalism: business as an end in itself, not as a way of furthering any larger goals, and conducted on the basis of personal connections, so that what matters is trust between "good men," not good institutions (none of this is changed by the fact that as a businessman, Bush wasn't a very good one). Unlike Hoover, whose opposition to government intervention in the economy was so rigid it cost him his job and his reputation, Bush has nothing in principle against it. In fact, his career in both business and politics has been built on a willingness to blur the distinction between public and private spheres -- not to further public goals, but always for private interest.

Ronald Reagan presented unbridled capitalism as a fulfillment of the freedoms promised in America's founding documents. But conservative ideology has deteriorated in the years since Reagan, and for Bush the free market has no higher purpose than self-assertion and stock options. His public inarticulateness has less to do with intelligence, which comes in many different varieties, than with the fact that he's against ideas. The most accurate historical comparison is with the president under whom Hoover served as commerce secretary, Warren G. Harding, who said, "This is essentially a business country," before his administration sank in a cesspool of scandals.

The business scandals of this past summer have edged close to the White House, but it's a mistake to focus on possible securities violations committed 14 years ago or potential misconduct by the vice president when he ran Halliburton. What matters isn't so much whether Bush or Cheney did something illegal -- it's the outlook implied in their legal activities.





The complete version of A Confederacy of Cronies can be read in the November/December, 2002 issue of Mother Jones magazine.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2002 The Foundation for National Progress



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 3:14 PM

MotherJones.com / Commentary / Columns

Decoding Bush
Following Robert Redford's approach to understanding presidential parlance.

Tim Dickinson
December 23, 2002

Nearly every statement that comes from this administration includes the phrase "The American people." Every time I hear that phrase I just substitute "industrial interests."
-- Robert Redford in The New York Times Magazine, December 8, 2002.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The presidency does not belong to any one person.... It belongs to the American people."
-- George W. Bush, on inauguration day, January 21, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My budget will fund our priorities, from education to defense to protecting Social Security and Medicare. It will pay down our national debt. And when we have done all that, we will still have some money left over. I strongly believe we should return that money, the leftover money, to you, the American people, in the form of tax relief.
-- Bush promoting his trillion-dollar tax cut, February 18, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a historic day... We have done right by the American people today.
-- Bush, celebrating the passage of his tax cut, May 27, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I oppose blanket amnesty. The American people need to know that. I do believe, though, that when we find willing employer and willing employee, we ought to match the two.
-- Bush on illegal immigrants, July 27, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's a combination of good conservation and an increase in supplies.... I think most of the American people understand that.
-- Bush, on sound energy policy May 11, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I ask Congress to work hard and put a stimulus plan into law to help the American people.
-- Bush, on economic recovery, November 09, 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The final great priority of my budget is economic security for the American people.
-- Bush's State of the Union, January 30, 2002


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As president of the United States, charged with safeguarding the welfare of the American people...I will not commit our nation to an unsound international treaty.
-- Bush, dismissing the Kyoto protocol, February 15, 2002


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ronald Reagan believed in the strong character of the American people, even when some on both the left and right were quite skeptical of that character.
-- Bush, praising the Gipper, May 17, 2002


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Senate now has one week left to make progress for the American people, and I urge them to seize the opportunity.
-- Bush, urging the passage of fast-track trade authority, July 29, 2002

It goes to show that when we put our partisanship aside, when people stop all the yelling and hollering and finger-pointing and say, "How can we help the American people?" we can get a lot done in this town.
-- Bush, thanking Congress for his new powers, August 3, 2002
It is landmark in its scope and it ends a session which has seen two years worth of legislative work which has been very productive for the American people.
-- Bush, on the passage of the Homeland Security Act and the close of the 107th Congress, November 20, 2002

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2002 The Foundation for National Progress

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 3:07 PM

Republican Code is not hard to crack, but it plays well with the crackers.
Winning the White Jelly Bean at the bottom is that other Republican senate majority leader, Joe Bruno, the white-maned, white-horse-riding leader of the legendary all-white GOP conference in Albany. Not only did Bruno volunteer a defense of Trent Lott even after "W" and others had deserted him, but he turned the Segregation Senator into a racial victim, asking: "What else do you want to do? You want to hang him from an oak tree?" Bruno's coveted award, of course, is named after the Texaco executives who were heard on tape ridiculing affirmative action efforts at the company with the declaration: "All the black jelly beans seem to be going to the bottom of the bag." Just 11 days after the tape was released, Texaco settled a two-year diversity lawsuit for a record $176 million. Earl Butz, the Ford administration's agriculture secretary, lasted a mere three days during the 1976 presidential election, killed by his October remark that all "coloreds want is a tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit." Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt was gone in 18 days after he made this comment about his staff: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple. And we have talent." It took 15 days for Senator Vent A-Lott to give up the ghost, collapsing right after Kiss-of-Death Bruno said Trent "ought to be cut some slack."


accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:58 PM

Our Department of Labor is no longer going to produce incorrect estimates, but no estimates. Bush administration is slowly wrapping a net of secrecy around the nation.
Mass Layoffs in November 2002
Technical information: (202) 691-6392 USDL 02-697
http://www.bls.gov/mls/

For release: 10:00 A.M. EST
Media contact: 691-5902 Tuesday, December 24, 2002


MASS LAYOFFS IN NOVEMBER 2002

Employers initiated 2,150 mass layoff actions in November 2002, as mea-
sured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month,
according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Each action involved at least 50 persons from a single establishment, and
the number of workers involved totaled 240,028. (See table 1.) In November
2001, there were 2,721 mass layoff events involving 295,956 workers. In
January through November 2002, both the total number of events, 17,799, and
initial claims, 1,980,856, were lower than in January-November 2001 (19,027
and 2,245,969, respectively).

The monthly data series in this release cover mass layoffs of 50 or
more workers beginning in a given month, regardless of the duration of the
layoffs. Information on the length of the layoff was obtained later and
issued in a quarterly release that reported on mass layoffs lasting more
than 30 days (referred to as "extended mass lay-offs") and provided more
information on the industry classification and location of the establishment
and on the demographics of the laid-off workers. Because monthly figures
include short-term layoffs of 30 days or less, the sum of the figures for
the 3 months in a quarter are higher than the quarterly figure for mass
layoffs of more than 30 days. (See table 1.) See the Technical Note for
more detailed definitions.

Industry Distribution

Manufacturing industries accounted for 33 percent of all mass layoff
events and 39 percent of all initial claims filed in November. A year
earlier, layoffs in this sector accounted for 41 percent of events and
51 percent of initial claims. Within manufacturing, the number of initial
claimants was highest in transportation equipment (14,322, mainly in light
truck and utility vehicle manufacturing), followed by food processing
(12,149, mostly in frozen fruits and vegetables) and machinery (11,280,
largely in construction machinery). (See table 2.)

Fifteen percent of all layoff events and 13 percent of all initial
claims filed during the month were in construction, mostly in highway,
street, and bridge construction. Twelve percent of the events and initial
claims in November were from administrative and waste services, largely
temporary help services. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting
accounted for 11 percent of events and 7 percent of initial claims, pri-
marily among farm labor contractors and crew leaders. Professional and
technical services contributed an additional 3 percent to all events and
4 percent to all initial claims this November, mainly from payroll services.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Mass Layoff Statistics Program Is Discontinued |
| |
| This is the final news release for the Mass Layoff Statistics |
| (MLS) program. Since 1994, the Department of Labor's Employment |
| and Training Administration has funded the program. That funding |
| will end on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) |
| has been unable to acquire funding from alternative sources and must |
| discontinue the MLS program. |
| |
| Limited historical data will continue to be available at |
| http://www.bls.gov/mls/ on the BLS Web site. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------

- 2 -

Government establishments accounted for 3 percent of events and of initial
claims filed during the month, particularly in educational services.

Compared with November 2001, the largest decreases in initial claims were
reported in transportation equipment manufacturing (-12,260). The largest
over-the-year increases in initial claims were reported in professional and
technical services (+5,042).

Geographic Distribution

Among the four regions, the highest number of initial claims in November
due to mass layoffs was in the West, 86,809. (See table 3.) Administrative
and support services and agricultural support activities accounted for
26 percent of all initial claims in that region during the month. The
Midwest followed with 65,567 initial claims (mainly in heavy and civil
engineering construction), then the South, with 53,960 (largely in admin-
istrative and support services). The Northeast continued to report the
lowest number of initial claims, 33,692, mostly in food services and drink-
ing places.

From November 2001 to November 2002, the number of initial claimants in
mass layoffs declined in three of the four geographic regions. The largest
decrease occurred in the Midwest (-35,580), largely in transportation equip-
ment manufacturing. Six of the nine geographic divisions reported over-the-
year decreases in the number of initial claims associated with mass layoffs,
with the largest declines in the East North Central (-36,050) and South
Atlantic (-10,623) divisions. The Pacific division reported the largest
increase (+6,789).

California had the largest number of initial claims filed in mass layoff
events this November, 62,764, mostly in administrative and support services
and in agriculture and forestry support activities, followed by Wisconsin
(15,544), Texas (14,624), and Illinois (13,657). These four states accounted
for 47 percent of all layoff events and 44 percent of initial claims for
unemployment insurance. (See table 4.) Thus far this year, 533,885 mass
layoff initial claims were filed in California, 27 percent of the national
total. The states with the next largest number of claims in that 11-month
period were Texas (119,327) and Pennsylvania (109,113).

Michigan reported the largest over-the-year decrease in initial claims
(-21,899), followed by Pennsylvania (-11,479). The largest over-the-year
increases occurred in Missouri (+5,515) and New York (+5,134).




Mass Layoffs Technical Note
Table 1. Mass layoff events and initial claimants for unemployment insurance, October 2000 to November 2002
Table 2. Industry distribution: Mass layoff events and initial claimants for unemployment insurance
Table 3. Mass layoff events and initial claimants for unemployment insurance by census region and division
Table 4. State distribution: Mass layoff events and initial claimants for unemployment insurance

Text version of entire news release
Table of Contents
Last Modified Date: December 24, 2002




Back to Top www.dol.gov

Frequently Asked Questions | Freedom of Information Act | Customer Survey
Privacy & Security Statement | Linking to Our Site | Accessibility Information

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
OEUS/MLS - Suite 4675
2 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20212-0001
URL: http://www.bls.gov/MLS
Phone: (202) 691-6392
Fax: (202) 691-6459
MLS Data questions: mlsinfo@bls.gov
Technical (web) questions: webmaster@bls.gov
Other comments: feedback@bls.gov




accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:16 PM