January 2004, Week 5

Dump Cheney Now!

By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON — The awful part is that George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein were both staring into the same cracked spook- house mirror.

Thanks to David Kay, we now have an amazing image of the president and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarro, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact.

It would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many Iraqis and Americans hadn't died in Iraq.

The Dead Center

By ROBERT B. REICH

he dismal fifth-place showing by Senator Joseph Lieberman in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday serves as both reminder and motivator to the other Democratic presidential candidates on what it will take to win in November. For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement — one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.

Senator Lieberman's defeat on Tuesday could be a good indicator of which side is ahead. To their detriment, Mr. Lieberman and the perennially dour Democratic Leadership Council have been deeply wary of any hint of a progressive movement, preferring instead an uninspired centrist message that echoes Republican themes.

On the other extreme is Howard Dean, who could be called the quintessential "movement" Democrat. His campaign is both grass-roots and reformist, and is based on the proposition that ordinary people must be empowered to "take back America." Similar threads can also be seen in the campaigns of Senators John Edwards and John Kerry. (Full disclosure: I've been helping Senator Kerry.) It was no accident after last week's caucuses in Iowa that a beaming Senator Edwards told supporters they had "started a movement to change America."

I hope that Mr. Edwards and the others will stay on message — and movement. After all, Democrats have seen what the Republican Party has been able to accomplish over the years. The conservative movement has developed dedicated sources of money and legions of ground troops who not only get out the vote, but also spend the time between elections persuading others to join their ranks. It has devised frames of reference that are used repeatedly in policy debates (among them: it's your money, tax and spend, political correctness, class warfare).

It has a system for recruiting and electing officials nationwide who share the same world view and who will vote accordingly. And it has a coherent ideology uniting evangelical Christians, blue-collar whites in the South and West, and big business — an ideology in which foreign enemies, domestic poverty and crime, and homosexuality all must be met with strict punishment and religious orthodoxy.

In contrast, the Democratic Party has had no analogous movement to animate it. Instead, every four years party loyalists throw themselves behind a presidential candidate who they believe will deliver them from the rising conservative tide. After the election, they go back to whatever they were doing before. Other Democrats have involved themselves in single-issue politics — the environment, campaign finance, the war in Iraq and so on — but these battles have failed to build a political movement. Issues rise and fall, depending on which interests are threatened and when. They can even divide Democrats, as each advocacy group scrambles after the same set of liberal donors and competes for the limited attention of the news media.

As a result, Democrats have been undisciplined, intimidated or just plain silent. They have few dedicated sources of money, and almost no ground troops. The religious left is disconnected from the political struggle. One hears few liberal Democratic phrases that are repeated with any regularity. In addition, there is no consistent Democratic world view or ideology. Most Congressional Democrats raise their own money, do their own polls and vote every which way. Democrats have little or no clear identity except by reference to what conservatives say about them.

Self-styled Democratic centrists, like those who inhabit the Democratic Leadership Council, attribute the party's difficulties to a failure to respond to an electorate grown more conservative, upscale and suburban. This is nonsense. The biggest losses for Democrats since 1980 have not been among suburban voters but among America's giant middle and working classes — especially white workers without four-year college degrees, once part of the old Democratic base. Not incidentally, these are the same people who have lost the most economic ground over the last quarter-century.

Law may allow ads attacking the Democratic presidential nominee to go unanswered.
By Richard L. Hasen
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2004, at 3:48 PM PT

Whoever ultimately emerges as the presumptive Democratic nominee from the front-loaded primary season can expect a pummeling from President Bush's re-election committee. That committee will have between $130 million and $200 million to spend on attack ads during Bush's own "primary season" (in which he is running unopposed by serious candidates) lasting up to the Republican convention—a convention slated later than usual to maximize the pummeling time. Bush's committee is borrowing from Bill Clinton's 1996 playbook when the Democrats used that period to run ads beating up on presumptive Republican nominee Bob Dole, though with only a fraction of the money raised by Bush's committee.

Whether supporters of the Democratic nominee will have the resources to fight back this spring and summer may depend a great deal on arcane administrative decisions to be made by the Federal Election Commission. At issue is whether pro-Democratic non-party organizations can raise large "soft money" donations to spend supporting the Democrats and pummeling Bush back. The fight to limit donations to these groups has created an odd alliance between campaign-finance-reform organizations and the Republican Party, and the coalition just may win before the FEC.

Since Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, which the Supreme Court substantially upheld late last year, parties have been put out of the business of raising six-figure soft money donations. A number of nonprofit political organizations, with names such as America Coming Together, are now poised to raise the massive sums that would be necessary to effectively counter the expected attack ads from the Bush committee. Because these are not party organizations but rather political groups organized under Section 527 (or other provisions) of the Internal Revenue Code, they are not subject to the McCain-Feingold soft money ban. Billionaire George Soros has been among the major supporters of some of these "527s" and has pledged $10 million to two of them.

Various campaign-finance-reform groups and the Republican Party have formed an unusual coalition to argue that these 527s should be treated as political committees under federal campaign finance law—meaning that Soros and other individual donors would be limited to a $5,000 contribution to each committee, and corporate and union contributions to 527s would be severely limited, if not outlawed entirely. According to a report in the Washington Post, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry R. McAuliffe to co-sign a letter to the FEC, urging it "to not sanction the undermining and evasion" of the McCain-Feingold law through these 527s. The Republican chair of the House Administration Committee, Bob Ney, has threatened the leaders of Democratic-leaning 527s with subpoenas if they fail to appear before his committee, which is charged with investigating whether these organizations violate the law.

It is hard to believe that the Republican Party has now found religion on the importance of campaign-finance regulation. After all, the RNC was one of the plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law in the Supreme Court. Now that the court has upheld virtually all the major provisions of the law, Republicans are doing what both they and Democrats have increasingly been doing for years: using election law as part of a political strategy. The strategy here is to maximize the extent to which Bush's committee can attack the presumptive Democratic nominee while preventing Democratic-leaning groups from mounting an effective response.

Whether or not the Republican Party approaches this question with pure motives, campaign-finance watchdog groups certainly do. The question of regulating individuals' contributions to 527s raises a difficult constitutional question (not to mention a host of thorny questions about the meaning of relevant federal statutes). The controversy should cause even supporters of campaign-finance reform to think more closely about what goals such laws should accomplish. To understand the constitutional question, we must go back to 1976, when the Supreme Court decided Buckley v. Valeo. In Buckley, the court upheld laws limiting the amount that people could contribute to candidates for federal office (contribution limits), but it struck down laws limiting the amount that people could spend independent of candidates to support or oppose those candidates (independent expenditure limits). The court said that contribution limits only marginally affected First Amendment speech and association rights and could be justified to prevent the corruption of federal candidates and the appearance of corruption. Expenditure limits more directly affected First Amendment rights, and, because they were independent, were less likely to cause the corruption of federal candidates.

With few exceptions, the court has stuck with this contribution/expenditure limitation. In a 1981 case, California Medical Association v. FEC, the Supreme Court upheld a provision of federal campaign law that limited contributions to political committees to $5,000, on the grounds that without such a limitation people could contribute unlimited amounts to political committees who could then pass dollars through to candidates. The same potential for corruption existed as before. A crucial fifth vote in that case came from Justice Harry Blackmun, who said that he might have reached a different result if the political committee challenging the law had made no contributions to candidates but only spent independently supporting or opposing such candidates.

That 1981 case creates a pretty strong constitutional argument against preventing the George Soroses of the world from contributing unlimited sums to 527s that do not make contributions to federal candidates. Then, along came the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission upholding most of McCain-Feingold. On the surface, the opinion appears a straightforward application of the old Buckley principles. But a closer reading of the opinion, particularly the footnotes, suggests some pretty radical departures from Buckley. One of those footnotes reinterprets the California Medical Association case to say that the challenged law was justified not only to prevent "pass-throughs" from committees to candidates but also to prevent such groups from spending independently on candidates.

That reinterpretation is consistent with the rest of McConnell. The court is very concerned that the old soft money system will re-emerge in an equally corrupt system of very large donors securing access to political officials through contributions to new conduits. The court was so concerned with the possibility of "circumvention" of existing campaign-finance law that it upheld substantial federal regulation of local political parties and candidates on the fear that they might someday be used to gain access to federal candidates.

The Federal Election Commission, reading McConnell, could well state that the same dangers of circumvention apply to these 527s. On the other hand, it could reject regulation by pointing to other language in McConnell stating that parties are "uniquely positioned to serve as conduits for corruption." This matter could well end up back in the courts.

Should the FEC or courts interpret the Constitution to allow George Soros or other large donors to contribute substantial sums to 527s? Certainly large donations for ads that benefit a particular federal candidate will attract that candidate's attention and likely allow for easy access by the donor to the candidate. But so long as it is impermissible (under Buckley) to limit what individuals such as Soros can independently spend on an election, there is little justification for limiting the amounts they can contribute to other groups for the same spending if those groups are unaffiliated with, and do not contribute to, candidates or parties.

Given the Supreme Court's recent focus on access, it is worth considering how Bush's re-election committee has been able to raise such astronomical sums to spend in the primary season. It has done so through a network of campaign-finance bundlers who solicit their friends and business associates to make the maximum allowable $2,000 individual contributions to Bush's committee. (That maximum went up from $1,000 in the McCain-Feingold law.) Bundlers get credit for the people they solicit, and you can bet that the "Pioneers" (bundling $100,000 in contributions), "Rangers" (bundling $200,000 in contributions), and the as-yet-unamed bundlers who reach the $500,000 mark will get special access as well.

The wealthier donor base of the Republican Party, the fact that bundlers are raising money for a sitting president, and good organizational skills have all allowed Republicans to run circles around Democrats in raising these $2,000 contributions. (Democratic candidates who accept public financing may not even raise such sums.)

This imbalance raises the important policy questions: Should wealthy supporters of the Democrats be able to band together to run ads supporting the potential Democratic nominee with roughly equal resources to President Bush's, or should the public be concerned more with the potential for corruption that comes from these groups accepting large donations? And what about the fact that these groups may be more narrowly focused than broad-based political parties? Would the proliferation of such groups further polarize politics in this country?

After this election, the public should reconsider the rules of engagement for financing presidential elections and either beef up the public financing system for presidential campaigns to ensure adequate resources for a fair fight or scrap it altogether. In the meantime, the fate of the presidential election could rest with an appointed commission, which seems even worse than the last time, when it rested with the Supreme Court.

James O. Goldsborough: 'Wal-Mart vs. America's middle class'
Posted on Thursday, January 29 @ 10:03:13 EST

By James O. Goldsborough, San Diego Union-Tribune

One way to look at President Bush's amnesty plan for illegal immigrants is through the lens of Southern California's grocery shutdown. Employers such as Wal-Mart, already under investigation for hiring illegal immigrants and other malpractices, will use amnestied workers to drive wages and benefits down still further.

The grocery business is living on the edge, and not just in California. Traditionally, grocery workers have been able to make a decent living. The wage of full-time unionized clerks averages around $15 an hour ? $25,000-$30,000 annually, depending on hours worked. In addition, workers have had health care benefits.

At these levels, grocery clerks survived in this region despite its high real estate prices. Often they had long commutes, especially if their stores were in affluent suburbs, but for decades these workers were as much a part of America's solid middle class as service workers anywhere. They owned houses, raised families, took comfort in belonging to America's company-based health care system.

Along comes Wal-Mart, the world's largest business, whose revenues equal an astounding 2 percent of U.S. GDP and whose power rivals that of the great trusts of a century ago. Specifically, Wal-Mart resembles the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which in its heyday owned 80 percent of the supermarket business, until Washington used the trust laws to whittle it down to size.

Wal-Mart plans to open 225 supercenters this year alone. That includes new stores and expansions of existing stores to add grocery departments directly in competition with Safeway (Vons), Ralphs and Albertsons, stores currently involved in the strike-lockout. Forty supercenters are planned for California in coming years.

Wal-Mart has the distinction of having four of its Walton owners ranked among America's 10 richest people, according to Forbes. The Waltons do especially well because their employees do especially poorly, with clerks earning, on average, 40 percent less than unionized workers, and receiving either marginal health care coverage or none at all.

The chain keeps its prices low and owners rich. Last year the five Walton heirs saw their net worth increase from $94 billion to $102 billion.

Wal-Mart's remarkable growth raises this question: How will blanketing the nation in supercenters affect our communities? In 1948, the A&P's abuses were flagrant enough that the government used the Robinson-Patman Act to enjoin the company from using price discrimination to drive smaller grocers out of business.

But antitrust vigor has faded in our globalized world, allowing mastodons to stroll the Earth again. Happy with low prices, Wal-Mart customers don't connect those prices to the demise of neighborhood stores, the influx of illegal immigrants or the use of foreign suppliers to replace U.S. companies.

Antitrust law once saw its goal as "the organization of industry in small units that can effectively compete against each other," as Judge Learned Hand wrote in U.S. v. Alcoa, 1945. Today, we have moved away from that view, but to where? Wal-Mart has replaced the A&P as the grocery leviathan changing the face of whole communities. Is this right?

In economic theory, the answer is, yes. In economic theory, pure competition drives down prices and everyone benefits: consumers with lower prices, owners with greater profits, workers with higher wages.

In the real world, competition is never pure, which is why antitrust legislation was written. The risk to society was that Standard Oil, Alcoa or the A&P would lower prices to drive competitors out of business.

And then raise prices.

Antitrust laws were one protection against rapaciousness, and organized labor was another. With unions, tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman and Henry Ford no longer could dictate wages via goon squads.

Taken together, antitrust legislation and organized labor helped to modulate business practices and create the American middle class.

Where will Wal-Mart find minimum-wage workers for its new supercenters, to help lower its prices, break the unions at traditional stores and drive those stores out of business?

That's where Bush's illegal immigrant amnesty comes in. Under his plan, illegal immigrants can be legalized if an employer sponsors them.

Wal-Mart, already gaining national attention for its labor abuses, will be the first sponsor in line. Here are three current charges against the company:

A government investigation accuses it of employing illegal immigrants. A group of illegal immigrants is suing it for discrimination. A third case involves the company's so-called "lock-in" policy, under which employees are locked into stores overnight, a policy that has led to several accidents.

Communities are wrong to focus solely on the benefits of Wal-Mart's low prices. Low prices come at a social cost vastly outweighing their benefits.

We won't see this until smaller grocers are gone, more supplier companies are offshore, amnestied workers replace Americans and no one can ever walk to a grocery store again.

Then it will be too late.

I suppose that Republicans and the BTB will dismiss this as more "Commie Propaganda" (Even though the Russians are our friends now) But I have written much the same thing far less eloquently. If this were the real world instead of "Global Politics" Bush would be on the waiting list for a seat in the Texas Electric Chair he used so many times on others far less criminal. Bush is killing people in our name and in the name of vengeance... innocent people, American people. The beginning is harsh but it catches your attention...

Chris Floyd: 'Ground zero'
Posted on Friday, January 30 @ 10:14:40 EST

By Chris Floyd, Moscow Times

A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.

He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a mass of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy's shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.

A day-care worker grabs the man, tries to wrestle him down. He turns, jams the gun barrel against her womb and fires. She dies, eviscerated, clinging to his shoulders. The other children have run away screaming, except for one little girl who's fallen in the slick of blood. She tries to scramble to her feet, slips again, can't find her footing, claws at the floor in a wild panic. The man fires into her back, obliterating her spine, the heavy bullet drilling through the polished wood below.

The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: Did he have a gun or a knife -- or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."

The cops roll their eyes -- another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"

The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? -- Say, you fellas aren't going to lock me up, are you? It was an honest mistake. I just got bad advice, that's all."

This fable is the precise moral equivalent of the Bush Regime's murderous misadventure in Iraq. Last week, the Regime's own duly-appointed, CIA-paid weapons hunter, David Kay, finally coughed up a dinosaur-sized bone and admitted, openly, publicly, what the sane world has long known: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war -- and in fact hadn't had any since George Bush Senior stopped supplying Saddam Hussein with the money and material to make them many years ago.

The existence of Iraqi WMD and the dire threat it posed to America and the world was the publicly stated cause for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The utter falsity of this claim has now been established beyond rational dispute. Likewise, it is impossible for a rational person to believe that, in the absence of any real weapons, a substantial body of credible "evidence" for this phantom stockpile could have been amassed by the Anglo-American intelligence services. You can't have real evidence of something that isn't there.

Thus we come to this unavoidable conclusion: The Bush Regime launched a war of aggression on the basis of evidence that had to be, by its very nature, insubstantial, insufficient, false. That's the only kind of evidence they could have had. What does this mean? It means they have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of children -- blown them to pieces, shot them, crushed them, terrorized them, rendered them into hunks of rotting meat -- in an act of moral insanity no different than that of a nutball in Lawrence, Kansas, shooting up a day-care center to "protect" himself from imaginary threats.

And they've reacted to the consequences of their crime with the same kind of moral nullity. Colin Powell -- the "moderate" Bushist, we're told -- simply shrugged his shoulders at Kay's revelations. "We had questions that needed to be answered," he said, while flying to Moscow to tell the Russians they must resolve all their problems peacefully, within the strict rule of law. "What was it [Saddam had]?" mused Powell. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons" of WMD? "Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"

Nothing, as it turns out. All those children -- each one of them an individual human being, each one a unique and irreplaceable vessel of consciousness, a single coalescence of the blind, churning forces of nature into a star-point of awareness, brief but incandescent, worthy beyond measure, and every bit as valuable as any mother's tow-headed darling in Lawrence, Kansas or Crawford, Texas -- killed, eliminated, snuffed out ... for nothing. For zero.

Yet Powell dismissed these pointless killings, echoing George W. Bush's Solomonic declaration on the question of existing weapons versus hypothetical ones as a basis of war: "What's the difference?" Powell said the decision to kill the children was "based on the best intelligence we had at the time" -- intelligence that, as we've seen, could not possibly have been substantial or convincing. But who cares? We heard rumors. "We had questions." We killed children. We found nothing. We're not guilty. It was bad advice, an honest mistake.

That's all they have left as a public defense: the ravings of a man who killed for no reason, who sits in the ghoulish mire he's created and calls himself good.

Annotations

Powell Casts Doubt on Iraq WMDs
BBC, Jan. 24, 2004

Ex-Arms Hunter Says Iraq Had No WMD Stockpiles
Reuters, Jan. 24, 2004

Powell Admits Weapons May Not Be Found
The Guardian, Jan. 26, 2004

Iraqi Who Gave [UK] 45-Minute Claim Says It Was Untrue
The Guardian, Jan. 27, 2004

Iraq War Not a Humanitarian Intervention
Human Rights Watch, January 2004

Kay Cites Evidence of Iraq Disarming
Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2004

Mr. Bush's Fantasy Planet
Salon.com, Jan. 27, 2004

Last of the Believers
The Guardian, Jan. 28, 2004

Cheney: Direct Threats Require Direct Action
Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 25, 2004

The Bush Dynasty's Dark Magic
Salon.com, Jan. 27, 2004