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"Utopian Republicanism" and the new Marquis de Sade

Now that his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby has resigned and faces the very real possibility of some serious jail time, what about Dick Cheney?  Has he been chastened?  Libby in all likelihood took the fall for his boss.  You'd think the VP would be humbled.

Well, think again.  He has not only swiftly replaced the Scooter, he's also revealed, according to Georgie Anne Geyer, his true identity -- the Marquis de Sade:

"I would say that the deceptive man from sunny Wyoming has become the Marquis de Sade of America. Think about it -- he is insistent upon making torturers of many of our young soldiers -- your children.

"In both the Afghan and the Iraq war, the U.S. has been involved -- as never before in ANY war -- with carefully conceived methods of torture -- 'waterboarding' or simulated drowning, mock execution, beatings until death, the deliberate withholding of pain medication, the burning and desecration of enemy bodies, and every possible form of sexual perversion."

In all fairness, the news that Cheney wants more U.S. torture broke the day before the Libby indictment, but you gotta figure that Cheney knew well in advance what was coming down.  So here's my interpretation of  Cheney's coming out as torturer-in-chief:
Since the curtains have been thrown open on the secretive Bush Administration, why bother with the charade?  This group of neocon warmongers plays for keeps, and if you, the American people, want to  observe the outdated Geneva Conventions and play by the rules in the face of the "terrorist threat", well, tough!  Try to do something about it!

In an earlier column, Geyer describes the dismay of Bush the Elder and Brent Scowcroft at the reckless militarism central to the foreign policy of George W.'s administration.
George H.W. and Scowcroft are

"... part of the realist school of foreign policy that believes in the prudent use of force for American interests. George W. and his neocons and Cheney are part of a new utopian Republicanism, which believes in spreading democracy through force."

It seems that Cheney has thrown down the gauntlet.  It's time to choose sides, for or against the no-holds barred war in Iraq.

Me, I choose the anti-war side.   

Peter Bray, Measure 37, and the Endangered Species Act

Peter Bray's Land Use Watch blog is an indispensable bulwark against assaults on land use planning by Measure 37 property rights absolutists.  And against threats to the federal equivalent of Oregon's visionary land use laws, the Endangered Species Act. 

The responses to his post about 1000 Friends of Oregon support of  compensation for some property owners, however, reveal a disturbing ignorance about the role of government in protecting the "common good" through planning and environmental regulation. Governmental "takings", the catchword of the property rights movement, seems to be the main point of contention:

"I don’t understand why so many people can’t understand the fairness of compensation for public takings."

"Sorry to be so simple. I blame the whole being raised in a free country thing, unrealistic expectations of free-choice and property rights and all. I’ll let you get back to building a fence around Oregon and preventing any economic growth."

And then this from a frequent contributer to Blue Oregon, the progressive Democratic weblog:

"To have an on-going business and then to limit it causes economic damage. To somehow say that this is not important and to be dismissive is insensitivity in the extreme. This is not lost on rural people.

"The greatest problem with the Endangered Species Act is its lack of compensation. The greatest problem with Oregon’s land use laws is its lack of compensation when real losses take place."

The issue of "takings" by government regulation has been dealt with intelligently and comprehensively by Russell Sadler in this post for Blue Oregon.  So let me address the issue of the Endangered Species Act.

The greatest problem with the Endangered Species Act is not its lack of compensation.  The problem is that the law deals with species rather than habitat.  If the law had been passed as the Endangered Habitat (or ecosystem) Act, which is its real intention, there would be far fewer complaints about it today.    And Richard Pombo would not have the support he now has for his proposed legislation to "reform" the ESA.

The ESA is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, where the dog is habitat and the tail the threatened species.  It would be much easier and more sensible to simply protect habitat.  And more effective, for two fundamental reasons.

First, most life species are still unknown to scientists, as this article on biodiversity clearly shows.  Only an estimated 12 percent of animal species, for example, have actually been identified.  Furthermore, the demise of one species usually signals trouble for several others. 

That phenomenon illustrates the second problem with the protection of species over habitat.  It ignores the the underlying principal of healthy ecosystems:  interdependence.  No single species, from bacteria or fungi, to the grizzly bear or the bald eagle, is more important than any other in the health of an ecosystem.

In that sense, the "loss" to rural property owners is outweighed considerably by the environmental damage to habitat that, say, ranching and logging cause.  Logging by definition destroys habitat by turnng forests-- ecosystems-- into tree farms.  Ranching similarly turns native grasslands--again ecosystems-- into cow pastures.  In the process, both have done untold damage to streams and watersheds.  Why should these economic interests be compensated by the government? 

The greater irony is that ranching and logging in rural Oregon occur largely on public  land.  They are in effect already subsidized by the public, just as farming is throughout the United States.

Isn't that compensation enough?

 

Libby indictment strikes at the heart of the neocon cabal

To opponents of the war in Iraq the indictment of Irv (Irving?) Lewis Libby should be welcome news, even better news than the hoped for indictment of Bush's political brain, Karl Rove.

Scooter Libby is a secretive character not especially well-known to the public.  What we do know about him, however, can be summed up succinctly:

• Libby is a charter member of the "Vulcans", the group primarily repsonsible for planning and implementing the invasion of Iraq.
• Libby "... was among the administration's fiercest proponents of the invasion..."
• Libby's office prepared the remarks delivered by Colin Powell to the U.N. on the existence of Iraqi WMD's.
• Libby is a devotee (with his boss Dick Cheney) of Hoover Institution "classicist and military historian" Victor Davis Hanson, "...who posits that warfare is an inevitable part of civilization, evil is a basic condition of humanity, and tyrants must be confronted by the harshest possible means."  (Hanson's op-ed pieces are regularly inflicted upon the readers of the Oregonian.)

Hanson is a conservative ideologue who has written pieces like this defending the torture and mistreatment of detainees in Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison:

"Right now we see only revolting pictures that properly shock our sensibilities. But because we do not know the circumstances of the interrogations, the conditions of confinement, or the nature of the acts that warranted imprisonment, we are also ignorant to what degree, if any, these men were responsible for horrendous acts -- or if their clumsy interrogators were trying to shame and humiliate them to extract information to save other lives."

Libby is to White House foreign policy what Rove is to it's political strategies.  He may indeed be the most influential of the neocons within the White House.  One could argue that without the proddings and encouragement of Libby, the war in Iraq would never have happened.

In that sense, his indictment and resignation as Bush Administration advisor is indeed good news for the opponents of the militarism unleashed on the world by George W. Bush.

Bringing "decency" to Iraq

The continuing evolution of the justification for invading Iraq is astounding.  First it was  disarming Saddam.  Then democratizing the region.  The latest?  Bringing "decency" to a country long deprived of it. 

So says the most fervent of the journalistic warmongers, Charles Krauthammer, who cites as his source the most fervent of the intellectual warmongers, Fouad Ajami, long the darling of the neoconservative war party:

"The secret is out," says Fouad Ajami. "There is something decent unfolding in Iraq. It's unfolding in the shadow of a terrible insurgency, but a society is finding its way to constitutional politics."

In a column dismissing critics of the war--Cindy Sheehan, "a disaster for the antiwar movement", and the "cold-blooded realist" Brent Scowcroft--  Krauthammer hails Ajami's vision:

"Instead, Ajami celebrates the coming of decency in a place where decency was outlawed 30 years ago."

Apparently Krauthammer never saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib.  Iraq's colonial history may also have slipped his mind.  Nevertheless, it seems odd at best to think of war as the best means of bringing about decency.  There is nothing decent, to my way of thinking, about warfare.

Who is Fouad Ajami?  Like Ahmed Chalabi, Ajami is a Shiite ex-patriot, albeit from Lebanon, who has spent most of his life in the United States.  And like Chalabi, he is a cheerleader for the American imperial adventure in Iraq, and was used by Dick Cheney as an Arab authority in the run-up to the invasion:

"As for the reaction of the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation in Basra and Baghdad, the streets are sure to erupt in joy."

Given what's happened in Iraq, Ajami should have about as much credibility as an "Arab authority" as Chalabi, who fed flawed intelligence to the neocon cabal responsible for the  debacle in Iraq. 

Krauthammer, however, isn't picky.  He'll take his "Arab authorities" wherever he can find them.

An ironic aside:  Fouad Ajami teaches at the School for Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C., the same institution that employed the most infamous of the neocons, Paul Wolfowitz.

 

Why universal healthcare makes sense

National healthcare makes sense both economically and morally.  Most Americans believe that all citizens have a fundamental right to adequate medical care.  The few that don't, for whatever reason, should just focus on the bottom line.  And the bottom line is this:

The greatest burden on American business is not the cost of labor.  Nor is it competition from overseas.  It's the sharply rising cost of employer-based healthcare benefits.  And by business, I mean the public service sector, like education, as well as privately owned industrial and retail enterprises.  If the federal government relieved employers of the obligation to provide healthcare for workers, business would boom.  And the citizenry would be better served.

Why hasn't it happened here as it has in other western industrial societies?  That's a question you can begin answering by reading this article from the August edition of the New Yorker.  Here's the key section:

"One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

"What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita.

"Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers."

It's no wonder that Wal-Mart, a supposedly efficient mega-retailer, is doing its damnedest to cut employee heatlhcare costs.  Those same costs are also the reason public school teachers are willing to walk off the job when bargaining with districts reaches an impasse.

I'm sure I'll hear the argument from the free market anti-government crowd that this country has the "greatest economy" the world has ever seen.  Why jeopardize it with the immense costs of "socialized medicine"?  Here's my preemptive response:

No economy can be called "great" that leaves a quarter of its citizens in poverty.  The health of an economy can only be judged by the health of the people it supposedly serves. 

 

Lowering the costs of health care at Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart's latest PR blitz about going green and improving health care benefits for employees didn't last long. 

The release of an "internal memo" listing ways to save money on the backs of already poorly treated employees swamped the feel-good PR barrage. The memo pulled back the curtain to reveal the real story behind Wal-Mart's "Aways low costs."  (Click here to read the memo itself.)

The memo suggests:

• hiring only healthy employees
• cutting the company's contribution to 401(k) retirement funds
• hiring more part time workers

Furthermore, it acknowledges that "...46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million U.S. employees are uninsured or on Medicaid."  The company must therefore make the proposed cuts "...while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer's reputation."

You gotta love these "secret" memos that are leaked to the press.  You also have to wonder why people keep writing them.

Not that I blame Wal-Mart for wanting to keep its health care costs under control.  All employers share that desire, which is why I again call for the federal government to bail them out with single payer national health care.  Yeah, even Wal-Mart.

Here's economist Robert Kuttner's take on the issue of health care and why national health care is the way to go:

"Somehow, the rest of the industrial world can provide health coverage for everyone and only spend an average of about 10 percent of its national income, while we spend 14 percent and leave over 44 million people without health insurance.

"How is that possible? Simple: we squander hundreds of billions of dollars processing claims, having dozens of competing insurers spend a fortune on marketing, paying HMO reviewers to second-guess physicians, evaluating who is ''insurable,' and otherwise wasting about 30 cents on every premium dollar paying middlemen who provide no healthcare."

Socialized medicine?  Who cares, as long as it works.  I prefer to call it humanized medicine.  There shouldn't be any greedheads involved in the delivery of health care, like the family of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.  That's Dr. Bill Frist, ironically enough.

 

 

 

Hey Bro: Retire, then heckle!

Perhaps when my brother retires from the Foreign Service (he has at least a year to go) he too can join the ranks of disgruntled former State Department employees who are free to "heckle" the boss when she testifies before a Senate committee.

And why not?  That's what retired diplomat Mary Ann Wright did in calling loudly (perhaps rudely) for an end to the war in Iraq during Condoleeza Rice's typically long-winded appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. 

I actually don't believe Wright's outburst was rude.  Indecorous, perhaps, but it's the war, not a voice raised against it, that's rude.  Not to mention ill-considered, illegal,  immoral, and guaranteed to render America less secure from the threat of terrorism.

It was again left to the feisty little Barbara Boxer to hold the Secretary of State's feet to the fire on the ever-evolving justifications for the invasion of Iraq.  Boxer is, as I've said before, one of the few Senate Democrats with a backbone.  Progressives should be backing her, not Hillary, as the woman to beat in 2008.  And she's got this on Hillary, too:  Not only would she be the first female President, she'd be the first Jewish President.

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Speaking of spineless Dems, here's a good article from the American Prospect about "liberal hawks" and what the authors call the "incompetence dodge", their term for how liberal backers of the war in Iraq are excusing their now quite apparent erroneous thinking.  Their mistake, they say, was "trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently."   

"The corollary of these complaints is that the invasion and occupation could have been successful had they been planned and administered by different people. This position may have its own internal logical coherence, but in the real world, it’s wrong."

Or, in simpler and more direct terms, the decision to wage war in Iraq was both unnecessary and immoral.

Venality

Bill Moyers, in a speech to a group of environmental journalists, says we are entering a new "Gilded Age", not unlike the original:

"That was a time like now. Gross materialism and blatant political corruption engulfed the country. Big business bought the government right out from under the people."

I don't need convincing but maybe others do.  Take Wal-Mart for example:

• Long a big contributor to conservative causes, Wal-Mart may have crossed an ethical line by donating $5000 to Tom Delay after he was indicted.
• The net worth of Wal-Mart's first family, the Walton clan, is now "771,287 times more than the median U.S. household."

I've accused Wal-Mart of wanting to become America's "company store."  Now it seems some big corporate contractors involved in the Gulf Coast cleanup have beat them to the punch.  This article from the Associated Press reveals how the "little guy" is beholden to fat cat contractors in a relationship that hearkens back to the company stores of a century ago:

"Laborers, meanwhile, have pitched tents alongside the dump trucks and knuckle-boom loaders crowding the median of Orleans Avenue. Some sleep behind the wheels of their vehicles.

 

"They pay $5 to take a shower in a trailer brought in by the prime contractor. A catering tent, which served free meals in the first weeks of the cleanup, charges $7 for breakfast, $9 for lunch and $12 for dinner."

And coincidental to these developments, today's New York Times has a front page story exposing the environmental and social costs of mining the metal from which gave the Gilded Age its name.  Here's an excerpt:

"The extravagance of the moment is provoking a storm among environmental groups and communities near the mines, and forcing even some at Tiffany & Company and the world's largest mining companies to confront uncomfortable questions about the real costs of mining gold.

" 'The biggest challenge we face is the absence of a set of clearly defined, broadly accepted standards for environmentally and socially responsible mining,' said Tiffany's chairman, Michael Kowalski. He took out a full-page advertisement last year urging miners to make 'urgently needed' reforms.

"Consider a ring. For that one ounce of gold, miners dig up and haul away 30 tons of rock and sprinkle it with diluted cyanide, which separates the gold from the rock. Before they are through, miners at some of the largest mines move a half million tons of earth a day, pile it in mounds that can rival the Great Pyramids, and drizzle the ore with the poisonous solution for years."

That brings us back to Bill Moyers who, despite the efforts of the right-wingers who now control the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is still speaking out loudly on behalf of progressive causes.  Listen as he describes the initial stirrings of "muckraking" journalism born of the excesses of the first Gilded Age: 

"Lincoln Steffans plunged into the shame of the cities - into a putrid urban cauldron of bribery, intimidation, and fraud, including voting roles padded with the names of dead dogs and dead people - and his reporting sparked an era of electoral reform.

"Nellie Bly infiltrated a mental hospital, pretending to be insane, and wrote of the horror she found there, arousing the public conscience.

"John Spargo disappeared into the black bowels of coal mines and came back to crusade against child labor. For he had found there little children 'alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living creature except…a rat or two seeking to share one's meal; to stand in water or mud that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow…to work for fourteen hours…for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the nearest 'shack' to be revived before it is possible to walk to the farther shack called 'home.' "

Maybe this new Gilded Age will give rise to a much needed new journalism.

 

 

Greenwald's excellent (new) adventure

At the risk of appearing overly obsessed with the threat of Wal-Mart to Sellwood, Portland, the country, and the entire world, let me follow up on yesterday's post by announcing that Robert Greenwald's new expose of the world's largest corporation is coming to town on Nov. 19 as a fundraiser for the NO Sellwood WAL-MART effort:

Moreland Theater
6712 S.E. Milwaukie Avenue
Saturday, November 19
12:30 p.m.

For a mere five bucks you can be one of the first to view Greeenwald's long-awaited  documentary on the evils of Wal-Mart and corporatism gone mad.  Even I haven't seen it because it isn't yet completed.  But going by Greenwald's previous work -- Unprecedented, Uncovered, and Outfoxed-- we're in for a treat.

Business Week has an article on the "stepped-up assault on Wal-Mart", a coordinated effort by a coalition of groups opposed to Wal-Mart's business practices culminating in a week of action, November 13 - 19,  designed to showcase the Greenwald documentary.

Wal-Mart, as you might expect, has already trashed the film sight unseen.  All the more reason to set aside Saturday afternoon, November 19, to see it with your own eyes.

 

This one's for you, Bailie: IKEA versus Wal-Mart

Since I've been asked what I think about big box retailer IKEA moving to Portland, given my opposition to Wal-Mart, let's compare the merits of the two retailing giants.

First, IKEA stores are huge, much bigger than the average Wal-Mart Supercenters which top out at about 200,000 square feet.  Portland's IKEA will have 280,000 square feet of retail space. 

Of course that means a lot of traffic which isn't a good thing, especiallly if a store is located near a residential neighborhood.  Fortunately, that's not IKEA's intention.  The Portland outlet is in a industrial/commercial area near the Portland Airport just off I-205.  Wal-Mart isn't so picky.  It's perfectly happy to hunker down on the edge of one of Portland's neighborhoods like Sellwood.

But if increased traffic is the downside of IKEA coming to town,  here are the upsides of IKEA versus Wal-Mart in Portland:

• IKEA's stores may be huge, but as a corporation, IKEA is dwarfed by the size of Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation.  Wal-Mart has about 3400 stores in the United States alone.  IKEA has about 25.
• IKEA is a specialty retailer of build-it-yourself home furnishings.  Wal-Mart sells everything.  It's even trying to get into banking.
• IKEA generally sells quality stuff.  Wal-Mart sells a lot of crap.
• IKEA treats its employees well, especially with the benefits it offers to all its workers, even those working half-time.  Wal-Mart pays poverty wages and relies on the government to take care of its employees heath care needs. 
• IKEA treats its female employees well.  Wal-Mart is facing lawsuits charging gender discrimination.
• Finally, there's no evidence that IKEA has designs on capturing the entire retail market of the Portland metropolitan area.  That seems exactly what Wal-Mart has in mind.  One gets the sense that Wal-Mart won't be satisfied until it is officially annointed America' s company store.

Besides, I'm a Swede.  Who knows?  Maybe I just have a natural inclination to support all things Swedish.