They Just Don't Get It

Our Vice President can't let go of the idea that torture stay on the table as a weapon against terrorism. Facing an explicit ban on torture, passed by the Senate by a 90-9 vote, Cheney and CIA director Porter Goss met with Senator McCain in a last ditch effort to exclude from the torture ban clandestine counterterrorism operations overseas by agencies other than the Pentagon "if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack."

Proponents of such exceptions like to dream up hypothetical situations in which torture might be the leverage needed to extract information that could directly avert an act of terrorism. The problem is that information thus obtained is unlikely to be any more correct than what could be obtained otherwise. Furthermore these exceptions never are confined to such hypothetical cases, but are left to the discretion of those who have the power. Having such power inevitably leads to abuse and creates a culture of acceptance for the unacceptable.

Have we learned nothing from Abu Ghraib?

Washington Post editorial

[UPDATE: Far better than the Washington Post editorial, I just found this excellent posting by the Doctor over at thoughtcrimes.org.]

Schadenfreude, Fitzmas, & Plamegate Frenzy

It would have been so much cleaner if America (or that critical 10%) had woken up one year earlier and decisively changed regimes at the ballot box.

While much of the left awaits in excited anticipation of what indictments may be handed down, I share Jack Whelan's trepidation about what that will actually mean for our nation's future.

I'm worried. It just seems that the country is particularly vulnerable right now, that things are being held together with paper clips and duct tape. If these guys go down, they are not going down without a fight. Things could get pretty messy.

Americans convinced themselves in electing this administration they were putting the grownups back into power, but they're discovering now that instead they put in a callow frat-boy who might be the only one left standing when all the dust settles. I don't know about you, but that makes me pretty nervous. He's got three more years. It's one thing to pop the country's balloon about what they really have in this man, but once the balloon is popped, there he is. ...

When abstractly considered, being rid of Cheney and Rove would seem to be a good thing. But their boy in the oval office is in over his head in the best of circumstances. How confident do you feel about his stability and his capability to deal with the kind of firestorm it looks like his administration is about to face?

When I gave my speech to my County's Democratic Convention 18 months ago, friends had advised me to cut the line about "blowing the cover of CIA operatives for political payback" as news that was 'too old'. But it seemed central to me as a cornerstone of this administration's shameless mendacity. Suddenly that old news is revived, and everyone is on pins and needles. Well it's 12 months too late.

Don't get me wrong - I'll take the scandal and hope it finally destroys their credibility as Watergate did for the much tamer Nixon - but I have no illusions that the scars left behind won't be painful.

Rosa Parks

On the day of her passing, we thank Rosa Parks for her important role in bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice. But we also thank those who came before her, those who worked with her, and those who have come since.

The Rosa Parks story is frequently taken out of context, and there is a misimpression that it just happened one day out of the blue. Parks earned her renown after years of involvement. From Paul Loeb's article:

[the] familiar rendition of her story had stripped the Montgomery, Ala., boycott of its most important context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent 12 years helping lead the local NAACP chapter. The summer before, Parks had attended a 10-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision banning "separate but equal" schools.

In other words, Parks didn't come out of nowhere. She didn't single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts. Instead, she was part of an existing movement for change at a time when success was far from certain.

This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. It reminds us that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as the fabled moment when she refused to move to the back of the bus.

As a white male in 2005, I live in greater freedom to the extent that oppression has been lifted from others. One of Martin Luther King Jr.'s great insights was in recognizing the oppressive effect of oppression not only on the oppressed, but also on the oppressor and upon those expected to take the role of the oppressor. To the extent that inequity was still palpable in the sixties when I was growing up in Georgia, I can tell you that it was unpleasant for me. Of course it was ever so much worse for those on the other end of the inequity.

[Addendum: For additional background on Rosa Parks's action, the role of others, and the Montgomery bus boycott, please see Sheelzebub's excellent post at Preemptive Karma.]

Disaster Fatigue, but remember Pakistan

It's been barely over two weeks since a natural disaster which in most ordinary years would be the deadliest of the year. The enormity of the tragedy, though, took a few days to impinge on my consciousness, and then I was off for a week to attend a high school reunion, and realized just this week that the whole event had slipped my mind.

Over 80,000 confirmed dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, disaster relief the most difficult ever, and it had slipped my mind? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with our media? Did someone make an executive decision that Americans were just too fatigued by disaster, and we would spare them the 'hype' of this particular set of unfortunates?

I just scanned the major news outlets on the web, and most of them don't even have a link from the front news page related to this tragedy. Sure Wilma is bearing down on Florida, and deserves the top spot right now, but over a dozen other stories are sharing its headlines, while this deadly quake has been shoved to a scant mention and link on the World page. If I recall the tsunami remained front page news for weeks, yet here with a tragic dearth of emergency response, the major news media seem to be choosing to just skip this inconvenient tragedy.

A recent diary by media girl at DailyKos decries the lack of attention being paid to this by bloggers as well. Well, it's not too late to help, so let's get creative and think of ways to challenge others to dig deep, even as we challenge ourselves to do the same.

I know I am suffering from donation fatigue myself this year, with the tsunami, West Africa and Southern Africa famine, and Katrina already making this a record donation year for me. But Mercy Corps and other relief agencies are still out there ready to turn our cash into relief, so I am recommitting myself to fundraising for Pakistan two or three times as much as I shelled out myself for tsunami relief. If your company matches your donations, and you are not already at the limit of what they will match, I urge you to dig deep yet again and be a part of alleviating this suffering.

Local Elections

My ballot for the November elections came in the mail yesterday, along with the Washington State Voters Guide to the array of Initiatives and ballot measures up for vote. I've already written about my opposition to the foolish Initiative 912, and will be joining my fellows who are distrustful of the insurance industry in voting against I-330. I've not yet decided to vote for I-336, the lawyers alternative to 330. I like its promotion of transparency, but worry about the possibility that it may be too punitive of doctors in high risk fields. Both initiatives are outrageously long. It's amusing to see the 330 proponents try to leverage public distrust of lawyers in fighting for their initiative, as if there weren't a whole team of lawyers in the middle of putting it together.

One can do a lot worse than simply to reflexively vote against every initiative, as there is a solid argument that in a republic we ought to elect competent representatives whose job is to hammer out the details of public policy. I don't share the faith of some who think it's better to put everything up to a direct vote of the people, when so many rely on sketchy information to make these far-reaching decisions which often tend to bankrupt their states. In Washington State, the Resolutions coming out of the Legislature are a different matter, as the hammering out has already been done in a bipartisan setting. Certain legislative changes require public approval, however, and in the absence of compelling information that something is amiss with them, I tend to vote in favor of those. This year we have a Senate Resolution which I see passed the state legislative bodies with 46-0 & 90-2 majorities. Nobody is going to convince me that our legislators are that bad. Unlike the Patriot Act, which passed Congress by a similar margins, this bill is quite short, so there should have been time to understand it fully.

Our Republican Secretary of State, Sam Reed, who oversees the elections, seems reasonable enough, but I do take issue with this statement in the guide:

I urge you to research the issues, to prepare for voting changes, and most importantly, to exercise this great privilege.

He's included the right list, but if voting itself is granted a more important status than researching the issues we doom ourselves to undesirable results. It should read:

I urge you to prepare for voting changes and to exercise this great privilege, but most importantly to research the issues, so that you may make an informed decision. You may abstain on any measures or candidates about which you are unsure, and the rest of your votes will still count!

Happy voting, everybody! Let me know about the initiatives which may be threatening solvency or civil rights in your state.

So Much News

So Little Time

These days it would be a full time job to do blogging any justice. I've never felt obliged to comment on all major current events here, but when everything seems to be happening at once, it's just overwhelming. So let me recommend some other sites:

For great insights on the Plame case and Rove's upcoming testimony, check out Firedoglake, where Jane Hamsher has recently teamed up with ReddHedd to deliver all the sinister speculations as the wheels are coming off BushCo. Great Photoshopping of Rove's recent trip up, Jane! ;-)

Ordinarily I'd be anxious to deliver some commentary on the excellent vote coming out of the Senate last night. John McCain has disappointed me frequently in the past year, but this is the arena where I expect him to shine, and he did not disappoint. 90-9! Way to go Senators! Oklahoma is the lone state of total shame on this one. My heart goes out to all you believers in human decency in the Sooner State.

With the Supreme Court season coming into full gear and a nomination still on the table, don't forget to check in on SCOTUSblog for all the latest.

There has been a lot of tragic local news in the Puget Sound area recently, with the crash of a Medic Helicopter carrying the pilot and two nurses, the death of two scientists, crushed by logs rolling off a truck on Tuesday, and the usual assortment of fires and crime.

That and a friend of mine is prominently featured on Grist, where he is ready to take all questions on the impact of Mangrove destruction and how we can help in the fight to abate it. Go Alfredo!

Finally, speaking of how we can help, here is a long overdue tip of the cap to one of the most positive blogs I've encountered, so what can I do? which always looks to action rather than complaint in encountering the injustices of the world. Karama Neal, the host, is currently celebrating the blog's anniversary by pledging a donation to three worthy organizations for each comment left here.

Death With Dignity Before the Court

Chief Justice Roberts was immediately thrust into presiding over a highly controversial case today. The ability of doctors in Oregon to legally prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients is being challenged by the U.S. Attorney General's office. In his very last day in office, Attorney General Ashcroft drew my ire by ruling that under the Controlled Substances Act, doctors' licenses to prescribe drugs could be revoked if they prescribed lethal doses for terminally ill patients meeting the qualifications of Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law, approved twice by Oregon voters, most recently by a wide margin.

The case is controversial, but it boggles my mind why it should be. Common decency and compassion dictate that patients enduring great pain, or facing terminal conditions should be able to obtain prescriptions making it possible for them to painlessly hasten their own passing. Assuming that we get past the current push toward theocracy in our country, one can easily imagine a day when people of the future will look back on this case as we currently look back on the Dred Scott decision. They (hopefully) will shake their heads in amazement and ask "You mean back then you could only get those prescriptions in Oregon?!"

Early indications are that Roberts is leaning toward ruling for the Attorney General's office. Supreme Court scholar, Jan Crawford Greenberg was quoted tonight on PBS' Newshour:

Chief Justice Roberts asked lawyers on both sides of this issue very aggressive questions; he saved most of his aggressive questions for the lawyer for the state of Oregon who was defending Oregon's law.

Souter, O'Connor, and Ginsberg were clearly more aggressive in questioning DOJ lawyer Paul Clement. But O'Connor may not get to rule in this case if her replacement is confirmed before a decision has been written, and previous precedent has been that such decisions are deferred in cases where the retiring justice would render a deciding vote.

Onlookers are split in reading how the court is likely to rule on this one, with Greenberg calling it too close to say, death with dignity activists Compassion & Choices writing "the Court is unlikely to uphold the Ashcroft Directive", and SCOTUSblog seeming to lean toward believing the feds will prevail. The calculus is that Souter, Ginsberg, and O'Connor will likely be joined by Stevens and/or Breyer, while Kennedy is more likely to join Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts in upholding the Attorney General's strictures against these prescriptions. Precedent would then hold the decision up until Miers joined the court, where immediately we would have a test of whether Bush has succeeded in tilting the court toward a ruling for the religious right. Perhaps Thomas or one of the conservatives could surprise us by allowing states' rights considerations to trump their cultural conservatism.

Compassion & Choices provides a full set of links at their summary page which goes on to say

The Justices appear reluctant to read the Controlled Substances so broadly. Several Justices repeatedly asked how Congress had empowered the Attorney General to preempt Oregon's law. With no sufficient answer, it seems clear the Attorney General exceeded his authority.

While I appreciate concerns for abuse of any death with dignity law, the Oregon law has multiple safeguards, and the history of its application bears out that it has not been abused, with those taking advantage of its provisions being exactly the sort of cases for whom it was designed. Concerns that it might be applied disproportionately among the poor or those whose primary motivation is to not be a burden on their families have not been borne out. It has also provided great comfort to many who know they have the means to choose for themselves when enough is enough.

In my view, concern for the patient should trump all other considerations in determining medical care. When the patient cannot be made comfortable and is expected to die within six months, it strikes me as the height of audacity and hypocrisy for anyone else to shake their finger at the sufferer and tell them they have no right to hasten their own death. If an animal is suffering we consider it an act of kindness to put them out of their misery. How much clearer it is in the case of a human being who can cogently express their desire to hasten their death, to allow them a dignified and painless method of doing so.

Doctors opposing this law point to their oath "to do no harm." If they cannot save the patient or alleviate their suffering, then they ARE doing harm by denying the patient a painless way out.

Culture of Corruption

The cynics are certain that power will win, always finding a way to circumvent what should be the consequences of corruption. The naive believe that justice will eventually triumph. Reality is a bit of a crap shoot, but by exposing corruption and exposing it relentlessly, we can at least increase the odds that justice will prevail.

Thanks to Evergreen Politics for pointing out the new Jonathan Alter article in Newsweek, which provides historical context for the current culture of corruption.

Congress Critter Calling Campaign

With Republicans reeling, there's no better time I can imagine for the concerned public to start hammering their representatives in Congress for reform and passage of a few bills that Tom DeLay managed to keep from ever coming to a vote.

It may be hard to generate public outrage over inappropriate procedural power in the hands of the majority leader, but the public can easily understand flagrant mistreatment of guest workers, and perhaps the need to limit corporate consolidation of media ownership. These are two bills that I know of which were proposed in the House of Representatives, which had bipartisan support and a high likelihood of passing, but which were never brought to a vote because DeLay had political debts to uphold, and was able to use his position to keep them off the floor.

Now is the time for Democrats, and Republicans for that matter, to re-introduce these pieces of legislation and insist that they get a fair hearing in Congress. I don't trust them to act on their own - we need to start a nationwide calling / letter writing / leafleting / emailing campaign to let our Congress critters know that we DO care about having popular measures getting a vote in Congress. George Miller has introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005, which one site lists as bill 2429 and another lists as 3732. But 3732 appears at another location to be a Republican sponsored bill to credit employers of tipped minimum wage earners. I'm looking into the discrepancy.

At any rate, we need to push Congress at this critical time to take on the issues that DeLay pocketed, and bring more public scrutiny to the process.
NWPT74

[UPDATE: The George Miller bill which includes an increase in the minimum wage is H.R. 2429; and a nearly identical bill introduced by Sherwood Boehlert of New York is H.R. 3413. Both are now stuck in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where DeLay apparently used his influence to keep them parked there. I have sent an email to my Congressman, Jay Inslee, seeking his advice on how citizens might most effectively have a voice concerning bills which are stuck in Committee. Certainly contacting your Representative is always appropriate, but those on the relevant committee may be the best to contact. I'm especially thinking of any Republicans there who are in contested Districts. I'll report back with further info.

ALSO - If you have any information on the particular legislation from much longer ago which had been proposed to limit media consolidation, but which the Majority Leader used his power to keep from coming up, PLEASE let me know with a comment here.]

At Long Last!

May this be but one large crack in the glacier of corruption.

I know, it's only an indictment, but DeLay has already stepped down as Majority Leader.

I had speculated that the TRMPAC shenanigans were the most likely to bring DeLay down, but with the extra attention on him, I'd sure like progressives to hammer The Hammer with the whole laundry list of his immoral behavior, starting with his support of worker mistreatment and sex slavery in the Mariannas. As I suggested before, while we may need to bring them down with nits, let's not ignore the elephant!

Another Political Test

Now after that recent post in which I insist that there are some noble underpinnings of conservatism, I follow Mike's link and discover that I am supposedly a:

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test

This in spite of the fact that I disagreed with the assertion that we would be better off with no huge corporations and should have only small businesses instead.

In a comic afterward to the test, the creators ask:

AND FINALLY, if you could make up ONE new law and have it enforced FOREVER, by goons, what would your law be? Use your imagination, let your despotic instincts run free.

What to choose!? What to choose?! (aside from suggesting that no one should ever be able to enforce any law using goons) I rolled the metaphorical dice and came up with:

Con artists and corporate executives who are convicted of bamboozling seniors or other vulnerable people out of their life savings should have all of their wealth confiscated and returned to their victims, and be forced to use their business skills creatively behind bars for ten years to make restitution to the disadvantaged.

Who Said It?

In reaction to Friday's resignation of Food and Drug Administration chief Lester Crawford, one U.S. Senator remarked:

In recent years, the FDA has demonstrated a too-cozy relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and an attitude of shielding rather than disclosing information. Now is the time to reform the FDA's culture and reassert that the agency's top priority is what's good for John Q. Public when it comes to reviewing drugs in the marketplace and making new miracle medicines available.

One of those anti-corporate liberal Democrats, you ask? Nope.

I wonder about the relationship between Crawford's resignation last Friday, and the resignation of Susan F. Wood, three weeks earlier in exasperation over the FDA's decision to further delay a ruling on whether the morning after pill should be made more easily accessible. Her comment at the time:

I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.

When I was a boy in school in the sixties, in the conservative South, my interest in science was universally regarded as a good thing. Do parents these days pray that their youngsters won't be corrupted by their secularist science teachers?

Does Wood now regret her resignation? Did hers in some way contribute to Crawford's decision last week? Anybody have the "inside dope" at the FDA?

Satirical "Lost" Bush Speech

If conservatives were consistently this brilliant in expounding their ideas, then they certainly would be quite formidable, but then they would also be less frightening. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the notion that the underpinnings of conservatism are ethically bereft, and all eloquence in defense of its policies is tantamount to cynical trickery.

As a liberal (usually) who is most annoyed by the dogged conflation by the right of liberalism with moral decay, one of my fundamental liberal notions is that sound values based on concern for our fellow humans can honestly lead people to different conclusions. It would be hypocritical of me to not acknowledge that some conservative values have merit, when my most scathing rebuke of many right-wingers is their refusal to acknowledge any merit to either the underpinnings of liberal thought, or an occasional success borne of liberal policy.

ScrappleFace consistently publishes intelligent satire from a pretty far right perspective. His attacks of the Bush administration are pretty consistently delivered from Bush's right. But while I would often vehemently disagree with author Scott Ott's prosriptions for an improved public policy, he strikes me as being in touch with the nobler underpinnings of conservatism, so much of his commentary rings true in spite of my disagreement.

Many on the left would dismiss Ott's frequent quotations of MLK's oratory as disningenuous because he clearly opposes many of the left's proscriptions for equal opportunity. But I see no reason to believe that his implied belief in equal opportunity is not genuine, simply because he mocks systems which he sees as fostering dependency and removing incentives for positive living and contribution to society. In fact I agree that any liberal system for promoting diversity and opportunity for the less advantaged needs to avoid those potential maladies, while I suspect that Ott would agree that any conservative system which demands responsibility and accountability should implement checks to prevent the exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful.

In the current political climate, I find myself unambiguously allied with "the left" because I see the rise of corporatism as a real threat to the egalitarian ideal which has been advanced in fits and starts over the last two centuries. The current leadership of the Republican party is marching us toward an ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor which is in dire need of reversal. Many leaders of the opposition rightly point to the importance of framing in the right's success in gaining currency for their ideas in the national dialogue. They will point also to the technique of smearing the ideas associated with liberalism in changing the tenor of the debate. The implication is that progressives need to wage a similar campaign in reverse to compensate for the current imbalance. They may be right.

My fear is that when all the focus is put into winning the argument for one's "side" we lose sight of the values that were the underpinning of our ideology, and we contribute to the poisoning of the dialogue for those of good intent on both sides of the debate. But we don't need to lose sight of those values. The liberal values of generosity, enablement, fairness, openness, and freedom of thought can remain central to our discussion of the issues. We can agree with conservatives that personal responsibilty, accountability, temperance, and caution are worthy values to keep in drafting a way forward, without compromising our own ideals.

This is why I find no inconsistency in declaring myself to be both liberal and conservative, even though I supported the supposedly "far-left" candidacy of Dennis Kucinich in the last election. It's why I never stop looking for signs of reason from some in the Republican party, because ultimately we need a synthesis of ideas rather than a one-sided solution. Too often compromises are tactical rather than principled and we get a muddled centrism which brings some of the worst from both parties together. But not always. There are success stories out there. We must find them and model them if we are to choose hope for our future.

Too Subtle?

Thanks Randall.

The Country We Want

Carla, of Preemptive Karma asks her readers what kind of government they want. She gives her own answers, followed by some responses here. She evoked this response from me:

I want a government and a nation that respects the necessity of opposing forces.

I want a country where individuals are always free and often inspired to aspire to greatness, chase their passions, and help their fellow citizens.

I want a country where greatness and selflessness is encouraged, but greed and meanness is discouraged.

I want balance in government, with opposing forces designed to assure that power is never concentrated in the hands of too few individuals.

I want transparency in government, and fluidity between the governing and the governed.

I want a balance between a respect for the privacy of the individual and the need for individuals and corporations to own up to their responsibilities.

I want a government that understands that personhood is an attribute of individuals, not corporations.

In short we need to recognize the truth of this reflection of James Madison nearly 200 years ago:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Then I went back and read her list in more detail. She hit some truths I missed, and had a somewhat different emphasis. I really like what she had to say about foreign affairs and leading by example.

I do think people should speak more frequently about their ideals, as there is a tendency to get hung up in all the methods and get attached to processes when goals are what's important. My emphasis on balance and opposition is a nod to process which I nonetheless believe to be critical, because human nature is unfortunately reliably corruptible. But we can give individuals a lot of rope as long as there are balancing forces in play.

Cronyism Continues Unabated

Avoiding the appearance of impropriety is something one might expect of politicians and public officials, especially when attempting to recover from a public relations disaster. The current administration shows no such inclination. If anything they seem to glory in goading their opponents into making accusations of wrongdoing which may not be provable, by behaving like the child next to the open cookie jar.

• "Nothing improper happened in our secret energy task force, but we're not telling who was there."
• "Scalia might cast the deciding vote in protecting that secret, but you just have to trust us that he can do so impartially in spite of his friendship and recent duck hunting trip with Cheney."
• "We'll straighten out those little overcharges (honest errors, of course!) by Halliburton in their Iraq contract work. How dare you suggest their getting the no bid contract had anything to do with Cheney's connection!"

And the list goes on.

I sometimes wonder if they repeatedly push the envelope as some sort of loyalty test. Maintain plausible deniability, but intentionally create the appearance of impropriety whether or not impropriety existed, to keep your opponents fishing, and to flush out the less than fully faithful among your insiders. The only other explanation I can think of is analogous to the serial criminal whose behavior becomes progressively bolder and more outrageous with each crime.

The Katrina cleanup and reconstruction effort has the silver lining of providing jobs at least, and Federal officials are the first to agree with many Democrats that such jobs should go to locals from the affected gulf region. But administration critics quickly predicted the first line recipients of Federal aid would be none other than those corporations to whom they owe their election. FEMA wasted no time in proving them right by outsourcing the body recovery effort to a subsidiary of a company owned by Bush family friend Robert Waltrip. And to further test our suspicions, it is a company which has been involved in previous scandals, dating back to Bush's tenure as Texas Governor.

The news of this outsourcing hasn't been widely reported by the major networks, but has been corroborated by Reuters, a Louisiana TV station, the San Luis Obispo News, the News Insider, and the Contra Costa Times. Deepening the left's suspicions of potential new criminal behavior by the private contractor, is the order that no pictures be allowed, and reporters are not to be within 300 feet of the work.

Of course, none of this is proof that any new wrongdoing or misinformation is planned. It is possible that in spite of the connections, Kenyon International was the closest available contractor to deal with a body recovery effort of this magnitude - I don't know. Preventing the gruesome display of dead bodies on the nightly news before next of kin has been properly notified has arguable merit. It is claimed that the contract is being given with a 10% discount.

But how many times are we expected to believe that "the dog ate his homework", before we demand accountability from Bush and his pals. Cronyism is rampant throughout this administration, and I can no longer take them seriously about anything. The only path I see left for this government regaining credibility is for the whole lot of them to resign or be tossed out. I know that won't happen. They'll turn out all of their best speechwriters to regain the trust of those that can be turned. The tipping point may have finally been passed, however.

Thanks to Hungry Blues, and Body and Soul, for alerting me to this story.

See also:
www.newshounds.us/.../bush_cohorts_profiteering_at_all_levels.php
www.observer.com/opinions_conason.asp

A neighbor's garden

My island neighbor, Julie Leung, one week ago wrote two powerful and beautiful pieces which are well worth the time to read, and to explore their links.

Acknowledgments

In seeking information for my previous post, I discovered an excellent fairly new web log which I added to my sidebar, but failed to credit in my post. thieves in the temple presents a kind of spartan approach to activism, with sharp commentary, sprinkled with links to political action sites, and a digestible sidebar, with what appear to be very carefully chosen links. I was immediately jealous of the uncluttered look, and found the linked blogs to be largely ones I had never seen before, and of similar high quality.

There's one other acknowledgment that I cannot make. The Labor Day post that originally led me to the United for a Fair Economy study was lost when my computer froze, and I have been unable to find it again. It was very similar to the Spitting Image article, but was accompanied by an up-to-date line graph which I've not seen since. If the author of that blog happens upon my site, please be in touch.

Obscene Inequity

431 to 1.

According to United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies, that's the average ratio of CEO pay to non-professional worker pay in 2004 in these United States. This represents a new trend in the wrong direction after a slight remission in this ratio since a peak at 531 to 1 in 2000.



A look at this four year old graph (thanks Spitting Image) will reveal why progressives were hardly enamored of the DLC directed leadership of Clinton in the nineties. But I contend that it doesn't require a progressive attitude to be appalled by this obscene inequity in pay between executives and line workers.

Back in June, I identified the rapid accrual of power to large corporations as one of three huge power imbalances which threaten our global future. The dangers inherent in corporate power are many, including environmental degradation, dehumanization of the work force, poverty and wealth inequity, and ironically the suppression of innovation when bullying drowns out invention as the means for corporate profiteering.

While the potential threat is dire, the outlook need not be so grim, as I really believe the possibility for corporate responsibility is nowhere near lost. Today corporate responsibility exists side by side with corporate malfeasance within many industries, and indeed within many companies. My impression, however, is that there are debilitating blindnesses on both sides of this debate, which make progress sluggish at best, while the trends do not look good. The problem within corporatedom is that there is an annoying reluctance, if not a taboo, against frankly facing the direness of the threat and entertaining truly radical reform among those advocating corporate responsibility. The problem among reformers who do see the direness of the threat is a similar blindness in acknowledging the necessity that industry insiders become a integral part of needed reforms.

It seems likely to me that these two groups eye each other with such distrust and suspicion that they don't take each other seriously and hence undermine the most hopeful course for achieving real progress in curbing the excesses that everyone should agree are not in anyone's interest.

I have looked for exceptions among the groups touting corporate reform, such as: Business for Social Responsibility; World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Center for International Private Enterprise (an affiliate of the heavily right U.S. Chamber of Commerce); or The Conference Board.
To varying degrees these groups have worthwhile projects going on, but their clients or members are corporations, and there's a palpable unwillingness to forthrightly condemn any prevailing questionable practices.

The reform advocacy groups who don't have such reservations, such as:
United for a Fair Economy; CorpWatch; or Inequality.org make unfettered observations which strike me as more honest, but I wonder if their adversarial approach precludes the conversation which needs to happen to actually effect some positive changes.

Free market apologists will protest that the inequities simply reflect the prices which the market will bear for CEO salaries, and that the buying power of the line workers hasn't really sunk (one will hear arguments that it has actually risen) so much as the executive pay has skyrocketed. But studies show that the corporations with the greatest payroll inequities are significantly less successful on average than those with more modest differences. And you can't tell me that it isn't morally wrong for the top paid executives in a company to make millions in salary, and many times that in other benefits, while the laborers who support their fortunes struggle to make ends meet. The market isn't working somehow, and not only is it shameful, it is bad for investors as well.

Shame may be the most effective tool for bringing about change, but it remains difficult to get an audience for these stories. The right-wing noise machine is committed to defending the free market against any effective controls, labeling even the attention to such matters as socialist claptrap. But beneath the surface, I bet you will find some executives who are uncomfortable with their obscene salaries, and there are plenty of examples of executives who refuse to take as much as they could. What is woefully needed is plain-spoken condemnation of the growing inequity within corporations. How can we help those within the system who long for more radical reform to be bolder in saying so?

Disaster Pauses

Tragedies, be they personal or national, affect different people in different ways. There is not one correct way to respond, so we should try to be patient with a variety of responses. Most bloggers I've noticed have either posted much less or much more since Katrina hit. Joining me in posting less have been Mike, Eric, and steakboy, each with credible explanations for their relative quietude. Respectively:

"I can hardly bear reading any more about Katrina much less writing about it and it just does not seem appropriate to talk about anything else."

"Current events here and abroad, coupled with the heartbreaking, corrupt impotence of my country's leaders (both Republican and Democrat) have made me so weary of late."

"the enormity of it all leaves me room to think of pretty much nothing else"

But others such as David Goldstein have been blogging like there's no tomorrow, both in reaction to Katrina and on a host of other issues. Actually, Goldy, as he's affectionately known, pretty much always blogs like there's no tomorrow. But his energy around the abysmal federal response to the disaster, played a major role in outing the preceding reputation of the now discredited Mike Brown of FEMA. (See the story here, and in various posts here.) The role that a quirky google hit played in prompting a national story is testament to the possibility that any one of us can play a role in our world beyond what we might imagine.

Katrina's wake will be following us around for some time to come, and my heart goes out to her victims. In the meantime, elections loom at home and injustice and inequity are never on vacation. Here I hope to pick up on some regular themes and expand on them with new information. As the ratio between executive compensation and line worker pay continues to spike out of control, I'd like to examine how such an obscenity can possibly be justified. Disaffection with Republicans seems at an all-time high. Why can't Democrats seem to capitalize? What are the political prospects for the 2006 mid-terms? And as always I'll look for glimmers of hope in these dark times.