12/03: BuzzFlash.com Talks with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., About His Emile Zola-like "J'Accuse" Indictment of the Bush Anti-Environmental Record

December, ‘03

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"This, to me, is one of the most alarming things that this Administration is doing -- it’s compromised the scientific process and systematically intimidated, blackballed, fired, muzzled and gagged scientists in every department of government. Scientists who produce science that challenges corporate profit taking, or that might be an obstacle to corporate profit taking, are routinely punished or punished by muzzled or gagged." -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For his entire adult life, Robert F. Kennedy has fought to protect our environment. In a recent lengthy commentary in Rolling Stone Magazine, Kennedy issued a brilliant, impassioned, well-documented indictment of the Bush administration for its assault on the air, water, and land owned by all Americans for our common good.

Kennedy serves as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and serves as the President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He is a clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law in New York.

BuzzFlash recently interviewed Kennedy about his case against the Bush administration's ruinous policies toward the environment.

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BuzzFlash: Your recent article in Rolling Stone caught our attention because it’s sort of a modern version of Emile Zola’s J’Accuse -- in this case, an indictment of the environmental policies of President George W. Bush. And toward the end of this rather lengthy indictment, you ask the question: "Does the government protect the Commonwealth on behalf of all of the community members or does it allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from the people?" That seems to be the central crux of the question about how any administration is dealing with issues of what belongs to "the American people in common." And certainly that’s something that applies to the environment. What is your judgment about the Bush Administration in terms of how it measures up on that question?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: One of the central roles of government from the beginning of the first organized communities has been protection -- the safeguarding of the commons on behalf of the public. The commons under Roman law -- under the Code of Justinian -- were defined as those things that are not susceptible to private ownership; in other words, the shared resources, the air that we breathe, the waterways, the dune lands, wetlands, wandering animals.

And under Roman law, if you were a citizen of Rome, the Emperor himself, whether you were humble, noble, rich or poor, could not stop you from crossing a beach flowing at an ebb and taking out the fish. Everybody had a right to use those resources. Nobody had a right to use them in a way that would diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.

That principle is echoed in the Magna Carta and in the constitutions of all of our states, through a doctrine that’s called the Public Trust Doctrine. And it’s at the heart of our environmental laws. And again, from the beginning of time, the first acts of tyranny were to privatize the commons. In fact, the Magna Carta was passed because of the Battle of Runneymede, which was precipitated by King John’s efforts to turn the rivers, the fisheries and the deer over to private corporations and privileged parties.

Under the Bush Administration, we’re seeing the same thing that happened in this country during the 1880s and 1890s, during the Gilded Age, where now -- as then -- large corporations have an undue influence on government officials, and where they are literally stealing things that belong to the public.

One out of every four black children in New York now has asthma. We don’t know what’s causing the pandemic itself, but we know that asthma attacks are triggered by ozone in particulates, and that the primary source -- about 40 percent of those components of air pollution -- are coming from 1,100 coal-fire power plants that were supposed to have been cleaned up 10 years ago.

But the energy industry gave $48 million to President Bush and the Republican Party during the 2000 race, and the payback is billions of dollars of relief from regulations that are meant to protect the commons, including the Clean Air Acts’ resource performance standards, which the Bush Administration abandoned last month. So it’s illegal for those companies to put those substances into our air, but the Bush Administration has now said that it is no longer going to enforce the laws against them.

BuzzFlash: You call this, in your article in Rolling Stone, "looting the commons."

Kennedy: Let me add one other thing. Yesterday, the Bush Administration announced that it wasn’t going to enforce mercury standards. And mercury, you know, is a potent neurotoxin brain poison. Forty percent of the mercury emissions in our country are coming from those same 1,100 power plants, and they have poisoned the fresh water bodies across America. They’re now 28 states in which it is unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state.

According to the CDC, there are 325,000 children born each year who have been subjected to such high levels of mercury in the womb that they are at risk for permanent brain damage. The Clinton Administration classified mercury as a toxic substance under the Clean Air Act, and required the utilities industry to remove 90 percent of the mercury within three years. But the Bush Administration has now abandoned that requirement and adopted a new proposal that will effectively allow them to discharge mercury forever.

BuzzFlash: How is this happening? You’ve been involved with the environment throughout your professional career. You’re an attorney who works on cases trying to protect the environment. How is the Bush Administration getting away with what you describe -- in essence, an assault on almost every aspect of the environment?

Kennedy: There are over 200 major environmental rollbacks that are now being promoted by the Bush Administration, and they’re listed on NRDC’s website. They’re getting away with this because the media isn’t paying attention. And the reason I say that is that polling, including the Republican Party polls taken by Frank Luntz, consistently shows that Americans across party lines favor strong environmental protection and strict enforcement of our laws. Republicans and Democrats favor strengthening our environmental laws by margins upwards of 75 percent. So the White House proceeded with an understanding that its anti-environmental agenda is unpopular with the American people and has successfully concealed its agenda through a series of stealth attacks designed to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

NRDC obtained a memo and released it to the press -- from Frank Luntz to the President and to top Republican leaders -- in which he recommended that strategy as necessary for preserving the President’s electoral strength. Luntz says in his memo that the rollbacks are unpopular with the public, including the Republican Party stalwarts, and that the science was against the Republicans on these issues. And he recommended recruiting industry scientists who would sow confusion about the science. And he recommended concealing the anti-environmental actions of the Administration underneath the mantle of environmental rhetoric.

BuzzFlash: Can you give examples? The cynically named "Clear Skies," for instance?

Kennedy: Yes, "The Clear Skies" initiative. The Bush Administration has followed Luntz’s advice by cloaking its anti-environmental agenda with deceptively named initiatives -- for example, "The Healthy Forests Act," which was passed Wednesday, is really a way of reintroducing 1950s-style industrial logging to public lands that were thought to be protected forever. "The Clear Skies" Agenda is a bill that guts the Clean Air Act. Environmentalists called it the Clear Lies Initiative. And Luntz recommends that, instead of weakening, that the Republicans use the word "streamlining," which they do.

The Administration invariably releases news about these initiatives on Friday afternoons when the press is sleeping, or on holidays. Over the next several weeks during the Christmas holiday, you can expect that we’re going to see a lot more of these initiatives.

BuzzFlash: The use of science comes off as somewhat ironic almost from the first week Bush was sworn in. One of the first issues that came up was global warming. He said we’re not going to enact any regulations unless we can first put them through a "science-based" series of tests. What you’re suggesting, Robert, as one of the subtitles in the Rolling Stones commentary states, is that they’re "cooking the books" scientifically.

Kennedy: Yes. This, to me, is one of the most alarming things that this Administration is doing -- it’s compromised the scientific process and systematically intimidated, blackballed, fired, muzzled and gagged scientists in every department of government. Scientists who produce science that challenges corporate profit taking, or that might be an obstacle to corporate profit taking, are routinely punished or punished by muzzled or gagged.

I’ll give you an example. Last year, a Department of Agriculture scientist produced a series of reports that showed that discharges from hog factories operated by big agri-businesses like Smithfield and Tyson’s Foods, the air emissions from these factories include, on average, a billion antibiotic-resistant bacteria every day, which cross property lines and threaten downwind neighbors and their herds.

I invited this scientist to make a presentation to a group of farmers and farm activists in Clear Lake, Iowa last year, to about 1,100 or 1,200 farmers and farm activists who are fighting agri-business on factory farms. And the hog industry -- the Pork Producers Council -- learned a day before he was supposed to make his presentation to us that he was going to visit our conference. They contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered him not to appear at the conference. He later told me that he had been ordered to not speak at over a dozen events -- mainly presentations to local county health departments on his findings. And remember, this is a taxpayer-funded study. The USDA also ordered him to withdraw the study and not publish it.

The study is peer-reviewed quality study that was funded with taxpayer money, but it offended the industry. And the industry has so much control over our government officials that the USDA, which is supposed to be protecting small farmers and rural communities, has instead become an advocate for big agri-business and is muzzling its own scientists when the science shows that agri-business practices are posing a public health threat. The same Administration ordered government scientists not to study methal bromide, another pesticide. They’ve ordered government scientists not to study mercury. And they’ve muzzled two scientists within the EPA who were studying mercury poisoning.

The U.S. Department of Interior has altered a series of reports on polar bears, trumpeter swans, and caribou in the Arctic that show that industry practices are damaging these animals. They’ve done the same on desert fishes in Arizona, on timber wolves, on grizzly bears. All of these reports indicated that corporate activity was threatening the continued existence of these species. And so the Administration ordered the science halted.

BuzzFlash: On this specific topic of manipulation of science, you have a paragraph, about midway through the article, about global warming, in which you mention that a report, which had been suppressed by the Bush Administration, was leaked by dissident EPA scientists. It showed that a Senate plan co-sponsored by John McCain could reduce pollution that causes global warming at a very small cost, and the Administration basically squashed that. To knock the leaked study off the radar screen, the Bush Administration announced it was launching a $100 million, 10-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact, occurred naturally.

Kennedy: Ha.

BuzzFlash: And you say now the delay tactic was done to benefit the fossil fuel barons. So we had a study ostensibly that showed really we could reduce the pollution that causes global warming for very little cost. The Bush Administration suppresses that. When it finally is leaked, then they come up with a study that’s going to waste one-tenth of a billion dollars to try to prove, over a 10-year period, that it’s all really due to natural causes.

Kennedy: That’s right. My Rolling Stone piece mentions 12 different major studies on global warming that have been suppressed or altered by the Bush Administration. And the President’s father did this same tactic. One of the studies that this Bush Administration has suppressed was a 10-year intensive study that was inaugurated by President Bush’s father when he was President for the same reason -- to delay action on what was already a consensus among the world’s scientists: that global warming exists, and that it’s caused by the byproducts of our population growth aided by industrial discharges into our atmosphere.

That report, inaugurated by the original President Bush, also concluded that this is a crisis that has to be addressed immediately. That was suppressed, and then the son has launched another 10-year study. His intention is transparent -- a continued delay on any action on global warming gasses.

BuzzFlash: Near the end of the indictment of the Bush Administration, you make the statement that corporate capitalists do not want free markets. They want dependable profits, and their surest route to crush competition is by controlling the government. You go on to suggest that what we’ve seen happen in the Bush Administration is that the industries that are governed are now basically governing themselves because Bush has appointed so many industry people to regulatory jobs. They’ve gone through the revolving door and end up policing the very industries they’re coming from.

Kennedy: All of our federal agencies have now been captured by the industries that they’re intended to regulate. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of our public lands is a mining industry lobbyist. The chief of staff in the White House, Andrew Card, was chief counsel to General Motors and its top lobbyists. And 22 of the top 38 White House officials all have energy industry pedigrees. We have a president that says that he doesn’t listen to TV, and he doesn’t get his news from the newspapers, but gets it from his staff. Unfortunately, all of his staff are from the energy industries, and the rest of them have corporate pedigrees. So they, of course, have a rosy view of what’s going on in our country, and their opinions about how our nation ought to work may not always reflect the best interests of the American public.

I think my concern regarding the increasing control of government by large corporations should be a central issue to all Americans. I was raised in a milieu where I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism leads to democracy. But it’s not that simple. Free-market capitalism definitely democratizes a country. But corporate crony capitalism is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria. And corporate control of government is fascism. The definition of communism is the control of business by government. The definition of fascism is the control of government by business.

A farmer sent me a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of fascism the other day, and the definition is roughly that the control of government by large corporations with right-wing ideologies, driven by bellicose nationalism. That has a familiar ring these days.

Democracy is fragile. It needs to be nurtured. It needs to be stewarded. And the free market has to be protected through government regulation. As I say, capitalists do not want free markets. They want profits. And the best way to capture profits -- to capture a reliable profit stream -- is to get control of government and use government to crush your competition.

And that’s what’s happening in this country -- the free market is being eliminated. And in many of the major sectors, the free market has already disappeared. There is no free market left in agriculture. A farmer can’t raise a pig and get it slaughtered, and bring it to a stockyard and sell it. The stockyards are gone. The farmers are out of business, and hog production and meat production and chicken production in this country is now controlled by giant agri-businesses, as is grain production. The same is true in the energy sector, and in the media -- you’ve got 17,000 news outlets in this country that are now controlled by 11 corporations. And it’s even happening on Main Street, where Wal-Mart is coming and knocking out the Main Street merchants, the small entrepreneurs. They’re really making American democracy viable. And it’s a frightening thing for our country. But we need a free market.

I heard him Jim Hightower the free market is a great thing. We should try it sometime. We’re losing it in America. And when we lose the free market -- the free market democracy, the democracy of the marketplace -- political democracy will fall soon after. And that’s something all of us should be afraid of.

BuzzFlash: Again, you’ve devoted your life to trying to keep the environment as pristine and as useable as possible for the public good. There’s been talk by some large corporations -- Enron was dabbling in it -- of actually privatizing water rights. Is the public not seeing what’s happening in terms of the privatization of the environment?

Kennedy: The privatization is occurring when a coal company and a utility poison the air that your children are supposed to be breathing. That’s the privatization of a public resource. It’s a privatization of a public resource when General Electric dumps PCBs into the Hudson River so that nobody can eat the fish, so it’s illegal to sell the fish in the marketplace, because those fish were owned by the public. And they were owned by the commercial fishermen who utilized that resource for generations -- for 350 years. But all of a sudden, those fishermen were put out of business -- the small business enterprises were put out of business because General Electric had better lobbyists up in Albany. And they were able to dump grease the political skids and dump their PCBs into the Hudson. They made a big profit by privatizing the commons -- by liquidating a public asset for cash, which were the fish of the Hudson River.

And the coal companies and the utilities are liquidating a public asset for cash, which is the air that we breathe. And it’s not just that our public lands are being opened, or that our water systems are being sold to private companies, but you can privatize the commons through pollution, because that’s a public asset that is being essentially reduced to private control. It’s being stolen from the public through your actions.

And that’s what’s going on on Capitol Hill. It’s much more subtle, in most cases, than somebody kind of outright buying a public water supply. But it’s much more ubiquitous too. It’s happening everywhere, all around us, with the things that we always took for granted -- the air, the water, the fisheries, the wetlands. All the things that are owned by the public, such as the aquifers that are the infrastructure to our quality of life. Those things are being stolen from us by private corporate entities with political clout.

BuzzFlash: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you very much for your time.

Kennedy: Thanks for having me.

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From www.buzzflash.com

Ivins: Good Sense on Oil Policy: Not in Cheney's White House

See Molly Ivins's column from Mar. 29.

My letter to David Brooks

Mr. Brooks,

In your column today you assert that Democrats "just said no" (echoing an orchestrated G.O.P. canard) to Republican "offers" of a big payroll tax increase for the upper class and upper-middle class, and progressively indexing benefits to protect the poor and working class from benefit cuts. Your claim lacks substance. These "proposals" were nothing more than trial balloons, to which no response was required or even suggested, and I saw nothing in any news media reporting any specific negative responses attributed to congressional Democrats. If you seriously maintain the truth of this claim, you should back it up with specifics.

On another point, it has been repeatedly pointed out by your colleague Mr. Krugman, among many others, that the problems of funding Medicare and Medicaid so dwarf the problems with Social Security that the President's emphasis on the alleged "crisis" in Social Security comes off as disingenuous, at best. The Congress has long refused to deal with the elephant in the living room, namely the huge problem of financing health care in general and the millions of uninsured. Other countries have faced up to these responsibilities successfully, but our politics is so wedded to special interests in the health care industry that this one sector of the economy threatens to virtually bankrupt the treasury if the larger issue isn't dealt with. The problems of social security pale in comparison.

It has also been frequently mentioned that the President's tax cuts are undeniably far more detrimental to the fiscal health of the nation than either of these entitlement funding "crises," but this issue appears to be off the table for those on the right. As an example, the hypocritical shilling for the Administration done by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has recently been cast into high relief for anyone willing to look at it honestly.

I think you're right that Social Security "reform" is dead for the moment, but I think your refusal to look at it in the light of the big picture of the fiscal irresponsibility of the Republicans in Washington does a disservice to your readers.

Thank you.

David Studhalter.

Conservatism as opposed to near-fascism?

Please see these comments by Paul Craig Roberts, an old-fashioned conservative and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. Roberts, without using these terms, illustrates the difference between old-style conservatism and the near-fascism of the current administration.

Cunning Realist on Social Security

A very interesting honest conservative take on the Bush plan to begin the phaseout of Social Security.

For the Sake of Our Children

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — from Earthlight http://www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy_pff.html

I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I’ve been disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if you asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America, What’s the gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have given you a range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming. Today, they will all tell you one thing: it’s George W. Bush. This is the worst environmental president that we have ever had. You simply cannot speak honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically about this president. If you go to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s web site you will see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that’s been hidden from the public.
We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president’s pollster, to the president saying that if you go through with the evisceration of America’s environmental law, you are going to alienate not just Democrats but the Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both parties want clean air, they want stronger environmental laws and they want them strictly enforced. Luntz said that to the president, and he said, if we do this we have to do a stealth attack. He recommended using Orwellian rhetoric to mask this radical agenda: They want to destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act, they want to destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Act. Most insidiously, they have installed the worst, most irresponsible polluters in America, and the lobbyists from those companies, as the heads of virtually all the agencies and sub-secretariats and even Cabinet positions that regulate or oversee our environment. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist who is probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in American history. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters in America for twenty years. The head of Superfund is a woman whose former job was advising companies how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist—these are not exceptions, these are the rules across the agencies. I think it’s a good idea to bring business people into government, to bring that experience and expertise. These individuals did not enter government service for the purpose of promoting the public interest, but in each of these cases, rather to subvert the very laws that they are now charged with enforcing. We are seeing the impacts of this already. This year, for the first year on record, the EPA announced that the dead zone in Lake Erie—you remember Lake Erie was declared dead prior to Earth Day 1970—is growing. Our water in this country, according to EPA, is getting dirty for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed.
The rollbacks from the Bush administration have affected the lives of millions and millions of Americans adversely. Consider just one industry: the coal-burning utilities. One out of every four black children in New York now has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We don’t know why we have this epidemic of pediatric asthma, but we do know that asthma attacks are caused primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and particulates. In the Los Angeles Times recently there was a description of a study that’s about to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine that shows that even small amounts of ozone pollution do permanent damage to children’s lungs. In San Bernardino, for example, ten percent of the children have lungs that are permanently damaged, that will never recover; and that lung injury precipitates in human beings a whole host of other diseases throughout their lifetime.
We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates in our air is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those plants. But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000 campaign, and they’ve contributed $58 million since. One of the first things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order the Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. The Justice Department lawyers were shocked. This has never happened in our history before, where somebody running as a presidential candidate accepts money from a criminal and then lets that criminal off the hook. Many of you remember what happened when President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and how indignant the press and the public was at that action. But Mark Rich was one person, and he never killed anybody. According to EPA, these 75 plants, just the criminal exceedences from these plants, kill 5,500 Americans every year. After letting these criminals off the hook, the president then went and rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we believe. We’re suing him, we’ll win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in the meantime they’ll discharge what they want.
I live in New York State. Most of the fish in New York are now unsafe to eat from mercury contamination. I live two miles from the state of Connecticut; in Connecticut every freshwater fish is now unsafe to eat. Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states it is unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at least some fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from those same 1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury that we didn’t know five or ten years ago. We know that one out of every six American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: cognitive impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney, liver or heart disease. I have so much mercury in my body, I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that if I were a woman of childbearing years and produced a child, that the child would have cognitive impairment, and, he estimated, a permanent IQ loss of five to seven points. There are 630,000 children born in this country every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.
Recognizing this threat to the American public, the Clinton administration reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act; that triggered the requirement that those companies remove 90 percent of that mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost, according to EPA, less than one percent of the revenues of those plants for them to do that. That’s a great deal for the American people, but it’s still billions of dollars for that industry. Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era rules and substituting, instead, rules that were written by the industry’s lobbying firm Latham and Watkins. On their face, they say that they have to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of the mercury. But they’ve woven so many loopholes into the new rule that they will literally never have to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the firm who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division at EPA.
We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. This is a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, my children and the children of millions of other Americans can no longer enjoy the seminal, primal activities of their youth—which is to go fishing with their father or mother and come home and eat the fish. I live two hours south of the Adirondack Mountains. This is the oldest protected wilderness area on the face of the Earth; it’s been protected since the 1880s. Today, one-fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain which is coming from those same coal-burning power plants, and this president has put the brakes on the statutory requirement that those companies remove the materials that are causing the acid rain.
I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians. I saw something that if the American people could see there would be a revolution in this country. We are cutting down the mountains, literally cutting them down. The coal companies blow off the tops of the mountains, using 2,500 tons of dynamite in West Virginia alone every year. They fire the workers: When my father was fighting strip mining in West Virginia in 1968 there were 114,000 coal miners digging coal out of West Virginia. He told me that strip mining was not only going to destroy the economy of West Virginia in the long term but it was designed to destroy the jobs so that they didn’t have to employ union labor. Now, there are only 12,000 miners left to get the same amount of coal. They do it by blowing off the tops of the mountains, and they take that rubble and they dump it into the adjacent river valley. They’ve already covered up 1,200 miles of our streams. We are destroying, flattening this landscape that is a part of American history. It’s the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a people; the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone roamed, and we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it’s illegal, you cannot take rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it into a river without a Clean Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act could never let you get a permit to do that. So we sued. Joe Lovett, the attorney from West Virginia, sued the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers for allowing this practice to happen. We won the lawsuit, and the judge enjoined all mountain top mining. Two days from that victory, the Bush administration rewrote the Clean Water Act to allow mountain top mining to continue forever; not only that, but changed the structure of the act so that anybody can dump rubble and debris simply by getting a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers.
If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting this legislation, Why are you doing this?, what they’ll say is: We have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection—that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. We want to measure our economy based upon how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the Bush administration has been urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joy ride. They are going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and that they are never going to be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the costs of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children.
There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. The free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you would eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production cost. You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.
I’ll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities, discharge mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the costs of bringing their products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete their competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the costs don’t disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they permanently injure children’s lungs, they put people out of work, they acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they’ve destroyed the forest cover of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in the price of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don’t even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m a free marketeer. I go out into the marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you’re internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat production, which is not only one of the primary threats to the American environment but also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It’s allowing a few monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of business. Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced completely by 2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they have to dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in order to continue operating.
I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand by what I said. It’s the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called "malefactors of great wealth," who would destroy them from within. Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more.
From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders—Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson—have warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our political systems and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination by the military-industrial complex. Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination of our nation by large corporations is the definition of fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism, says, "the domination of government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism"—that’s getting to look pretty familiar. The problem with letting large corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy, it erodes our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity, and it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our children. But the thing that we’ve squandered worst of all is our natural heritage: the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands—all these things that make us proud to be American. This administration has taken the conserve out of conservatism. They claim to like the free market, but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism, socialism for the rich. They claim to love property rights, but only when it’s the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or to destroy the public property. They claim to like law and order, but they are the first ones to let the large corporations and their corporate contributors violate the law at public expense. They claim to love local control and states’ rights, but it’s only in those instances when they’re taking down the barriers to large corporations.
They claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold mandates of Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that we are meant to care for nature. They have embraced this Christian heresy of dominion theology, which James Watt was the first to enunciate when he told the Senate, I don’t think that there is any point in protecting the public lands because we don’t how long the world is going to last before the Lord returns. The woman he mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton, is running the Department of the Interior.
The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore that at our peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally, culturally and historically, and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don’t feed them we’re not going to become the kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our children. We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We are protecting those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. I’m not fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the stripped bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that learned the same fishing methods that they’re using today from the Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait out the tides, and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history and understand that they are part of something larger than themselves. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where it’s all Unilever and 400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in America; where we’ve driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. I don’t want a world where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us ultimately to God.
I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God talks to us most clearly. God talks to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry—but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don’t know Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We know our Creator best by studying Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do. If you look at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition in mankind’s history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the skins of wild animals.
All of Christ’s parables are taken from nature: I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything that they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He’s not telling us something new, he’s simply illuminating something that’s very, very old.
When we destroy these things, we’re cutting ourselves off from the very things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life. And for these people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the mandate of Christ by liquidating our public assets—what they are really doing is a moral affront to the next generation. That’s why we preserve nature. Not for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation is expressed by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God wants us to use the things we’ve been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve our quality of life, to serve others—but we can’t use them up. We can’t sell the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can’t drain the pond to catch the fish. We can’t cut down the mountain to get at the coal. We can live off the interest; we can’t go into the capital that belongs to our children.

JAGs with conscience

It's hard to know whether to be proud of the military lawyers who tried to exercise some conscience, or just plain horrified at yet more evidence of the growing trend towards fascism in this country.

Via the Kansas City Star:

Sources: Military lawyers objected to interrogation methods at Guantanamo
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
originally from the New York Daily News

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations, but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, The New York Daily News has learned.

Judge advocates - uniformed legal advisers known as JAGs who were assigned to a secret war crimes task force - repeatedly objected to aggressive interrogations by a separate intelligence unit at Camp Delta, where Taliban and al-Qaida suspects have been jailed since January 2002.

But Pentagon officials "didn't think this was a big deal, so they just ignored the JAGs," a senior military source said.

The military lawyers' actions had never been disclosed and are the first known cases of lower-level officers resisting interrogations at the Cuban camp that might constitute torture. Some officials called them "unsung heroes" for risking their careers by crossing senior officials who approved the techniques.

The potentially unlawful methods objected to by the judge advocates were among 33 procedures authorized in a Dec. 2, 2002, memo by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and used on at least two detainees.

A Pentagon report last August found the prisoners gave "important and time-urgent information."

The lawyers' objections were that battlefield interrogation methods, where slapping around a prisoner might be justifiable if it immediately saved lives, were immoral and possibly illegal if used on prisoners far from a war zone and long after their capture, three sources said. Abuse cases reported in FBI memos obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union are now being probed by the Justice Department and the U.S. Southern Command, the Pentagon unit that oversees Guantanamo.

One of the judge advocates, an Air Force officer, left Guantanamo and then filed a Jan. 15, 2003, "Memorandum for the Record," sources said. According to portions read to The New York Daily News, the memorandum noted conflicting interrogation policies at Guantanamo and objected to aggressive techniques.
These were raised repeatedly with the Southern Command by their secret unit, the Criminal Investigation Task Force, a 150-person team of investigators from each branch of the military. Its mission was to work with the FBI and Secret Service to identify detainees' fitness for military war crimes trials.

On the same day of the 2003 Memorandum for the Record, Rumsfeld temporarily rescinded his December 2002 order permitting "stress positions," the use of dogs and "mild" physical contact to intimidate uncooperative prisoners, because of legal concerns.

The objectionable interrogations were done by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, a separate intelligence unit seeking tips on terror threats, sources said.
Defense Department officials refused repeated requests for comment by The New York Daily News.

The dispute about the methods at Guantanamo began after the September 2002 sacking of the camp's commander, Army Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus. He was replaced in November by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, whose later attempts to "Gitmo-ize" Iraq's prisons tied him to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

In October that year, just before Miller's arrival, the U.S. Southern Command asked the Pentagon to use harsher methods on detainees resisting questioning, and by December Rumsfeld had approved the techniques, which Miller then encouraged.
An Air Force colonel with the war crimes task force told a superior he was "aghast" at the harsher techniques. Long interrogations and isolation had been effective, a senior former officer said. And Miller dismissed the concerns of the judge advocates who were persuaded the interrogation policies violated the law, sources said.

Senator Feinstein vows not to "throw Social Security overboard"

Social Security Reform: My vow not to throw Social Security overboard
Dianne Feinstein
Friday, February 4, 2005

Social Security has provided America's senior citizens with a guaranteed retirement income since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law 70 years ago, and I believe it would be a dramatic mistake to privatize even part of the system.

Half of all American workers today are not covered by retirement plans. For them, Social Security is it.

More than 4.3 million people receive Social Security benefits in California, including 860,000 of them with no other source of income. We have the highest cost of living in the nation. When we produce new jobs, more than likely they are part-time and minimum wage without adequate pension and retirement benefits.

Keeping Social Security intact has become more important than ever.

In his State of the Union speech, the president vowed to "strengthen and save Social Security." But in proposing to carve out private accounts, he offered no specific proposal on how he would shore up Social Security or pay for the privatization.

Over the long run, changes are needed in Social Security, but we need to do it right. Unfortunately, the president's plan would cut Social Security's funding, weaken the program and make its financial problems worse.

With all the "crisis" rhetoric coming from the administration, people are beginning to fear for the future of Social Security. Wednesday night, after months of declaring that Social Security is in crisis, the President went so far as to declare that by 2042 Social Security would be "exhausted and bankrupt." That's simply not true.

We have time to do what we need to do to shore up the program financially. On our side of the aisle, we want to fix it, and I believe we can. There is a difference of opinion over the long-term shortfall of revenues facing Social Security. Using very conservative predictions of U.S. economic growth, the Social Security Board of Trustees -- which includes three members of the president's Cabinet -- has estimated that promised benefits will continue until 2042, even if no changes are made. After 2042, recipients would continue to get 73 percent of their benefits for at least another three decades -- again, with no dramatic changes to the system.

But to ensure that the benefits continue at the current level until 2080, $3.7 trillion is needed, according to the trustees.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the trustees are under- estimating economic growth; that $2 trillion is necessary to close the gap; that recipients would get all their promised benefits until 2052, even without any revisions in the program; and that they would draw 78 percent of their benefits for three decades, until at least 2080.

These are big numbers. But by making some balanced long-term changes, we can ensure solvency much further into the future. Some have made proposals along the following lines:

• -- Raising the annual cap for payroll taxes gradually from the current $90,000 to $143,000, which could provide up to $1.6 trillion over 75 years;
• -- Ensuring increases in Social Security benefits are more accurately linked to inflation, which could save $680 billion over 75 years.
• -- Repealing President Bush's tax cut for those earning more than $200, 000 and transferring the revenues to Social Security, which could save about $2.9 trillion over 75 years.

One other alternative would be to have the Social Security trustees conduct an independent and comprehensive actuarial evaluation every five years and make recommendations to Congress based on this data. Congress could approve or reject these proposed changes.

These proposals, and others, deserve careful study so that we fully understand the costs and benefits of each. I deeply believe that our nation should take the time to do this analysis, instead of rushing headlong into one plan or another.

The president has suggested that fundamental and dramatic change is needed -- in the form of private accounts. But even the president's own advisers acknowledge his proposal would do nothing to address the Social Security shortfall. In a leaked White House e-mail, Peter Wehner, one of the president's principal advisers, stated, "We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with Personal Retirement Accounts alone."

In fact, the president's plan to let workers begin diverting up to 4 percent of their income (or two-thirds of their Social Security contribution) to private accounts starting in 2009 would add more than $4.5 trillion in debt over the next 20 years, according to the Center on Budget Policy Priorities. But Bush has not, thus far, said how he would pay for this.

Social Security was never meant to provide more than a safety net -- the average payment today is $10,461 for all future recipients, and the average payout to retirees is $11,458. So in order to ensure additional financial security for our seniors, we also must do much more to promote America's retirement savings. But instead of the president's risky proposal that would provide little additional revenue for beneficiaries, we can make small changes such as automatic enrollment in 401(k) accounts and a simple check-off to enable people to put part of their income tax refund in an IRA account. Some financial experts estimate that these two small changes alone could double the national savings rate.

Americans must do more to prepare for retirement. But we can do it without a fundamental dismantling of Social Security.

My Letter to AARP: Let's Have a March on Washington

February 4, 2005
AARP 601 E. Street NW
Washington, DC 20049

Re: Strong Measures Needed to Oppose Irresponsible Bush Plan to Wreck Social Security

To whom it may concern:

I read with growing dread the articles in both the New York Times and Washington Post today to the effect that the people who will be most badly hurt, if this Administration’s reckless and deceptive campaign to wreck Social Security is successful, will be precisely my cohort: people in their early 50’s.

I believe that the Bush politicos hope to blunt opposition from AARP and other advocacy groups for Seniors’ interests by "guaranteeing" benefits to those over 55. This is reminiscent of employer tactics in wage negotiations to create two-tier wage scales where older workers are "grandfathered" into favorable wage and benefit packages while new employees are welcomed to the Brave New World of lower or no-benefits, and lower non-guaranteed wages.

I want to strongly urge your organization to treat this most dangerous threat to older Americans’ financial security in years as what it is: POLITICAL WAR. Not only the younger tier of your members today, but all of the organization’s future members, are seriously threatened by this ruinous plan.

I contributed when your petition appeal on this issue arrived recently. But I think the strongest possible action is necessary. Please consider organizing an AARP March on Washington against the Destruction of Social Security.
Thank you.

Very truly yours,

David Studhalter

Hell, no! To Bush Plan to Ruin Social Security

I'm sending this to my congressman and 2 senators:

Dear ~,

Having reviewed the contents of Mr. Bush's deceptive and ill-reasoned speech on the State of the Union, I just want to emphasize once again: IF THERE IS ONE ISSUE DEMOCRATS EXPECT CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS OF THEIR PARTY TO FIGHT ALL THE WAY AGAINST, IT'S BUSH'S WHOLLY UNACCEPTABLE PLAN TO RUIN SOCIAL SECURITY.

There can be no real compromise with such a dangerous and elitist scheme, obviously motivated as it is by a desire to turn back the clock to before the very existence of New Deal Social Programs. Obviously, they want to ease the path for the very rich even more, at the expense of everyone else. The misleading propaganda techniques used by this most-dishonest-ever administration are effective, but they can't fool everyone, and older Americans are saying, 'Hell, No! We won't have it and we won't support anyone who cooperates in any way with it!'

Thank you.

Dean Reported Likely to Be DNC Chairman

The New York Times is reporting that Howard Dean is likely to be chosen as DNC Chair. I regard this as a positive development, amid the bleak news from Washington and the increasingly dismal prospects of the US economy and foreign policy stance. The good doctor is a solid, real Democrat. I firmly believe that Democrats will not turn the tide and take back the country, to use Dean's fabled phrase, until they stop trying to be Republicans light.

Word for the Day

prelapsarian · "prE-"lap-'ser-E-&n · adjective

: characteristic of or belonging to the time or state before the fall of mankind

Etymology: pre- + Latin lapsus slip, fall – compare lapse

Word for the Day

endomorphic · "en-d&-'mor-fik; –do- · adjective

1 : of or relating to the component in W. H. Sheldon's (obsolete) classification of body types that measures the massiveness of the digestive viscera and the body's degree of roundedness and softness
2 : having a heavy rounded body build often with a marked tendency to become fat

- endomor·phy · -fi – · noun
- endomorph · noun · an individual displaying such characteristics

Etymology: [Biol.] endoderm + -morphic; from the predominance in such types of structures developed from the endoderm, q.v.

Mozart Anniversary

Today, January 27, 2005, is the 249th anniversary of the birth of W. A. Mozart (1756-1791).

Word for the Day

moiety \MOY-&-ti\ noun

1. One of two equal parts; a half.
2. An indefinite part; a small portion or share.
3. One of two basic tribal subdivisions.

Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Cut off from news at home, fearful of a blood bath, anxious to salvage a moiety of the reform program, the Prague leadership accepted Moscow’s diktat.
--Karl E. Meyer, "Pangloss in Prague," New York Times, June 27, 1993

Barunga society is sharply divided into two complementary, descent-based branches (a structure anthropologists call "moiety"), which permeate relationships, spirituality, and many other aspects of life.
--Claire Smith, "Art of The Dreaming," Discovering Archaeology, March/April 2000
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Moiety comes from Old French meitiet, from Late Latin medietas, from Latin medius, "middle."

United Church of Christ Welcomes Sponge Bob

SpongeBob receives 'unequivocal welcome' from United Church of Christ
By J. Bennett Guess~United Church News~Jan.24, 2005
(accompanied by photo of Rev. Thomas welcoming Sponge Bob in his office)

CLEVELAND -- Joining the animated fray, the United Church of Christ today (Jan. 24) said that Jesus' message of extravagant welcome extends to all, including SpongeBob Squarepants - the cartoon character that has come under fire for allegedly holding hands with a starfish.
"Absolutely, the UCC extends an unequivocal welcome to SpongeBob," the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's general minister and president, said, only partly in jest. "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we."
For that matter, Thomas explained, the 1.3-million-member church, if given the opportunity, would warmly receive Barney, Big Bird, Tinky-Winky, Clifford the Big Red Dog or, for that matter, any who have experienced the Christian message as a harsh word of judgment rather than Jesus' offering of grace.
The UCC's welcome comes in the wake of laughable accusations by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that the popular SpongeBob and other well-known cartoon characters are crossing "a moral line" by stressing tolerance in a national We Are Family Foundation-sponsored video that will be distributed to U.S. schools on March 11, 2005.
Later, an assistant to Dobson called SpongeBob's participation in the video "insidious."
Thomas said, on the contrary, it is Dobson who is crossing the moral line for sending the mistaken message that Christians do not value tolerance and diversity as important religious values.
"While Dobson's silly accusation makes headlines, it's also one more concrete example of how religion is misused over and over to promote intolerance over inclusion," Thomas said. "This is why we believe it is so important that the UCC speak the Gospel in an accent not often heard in our culture, because far too many experience the cross only as judgment, never as embrace."
Dobson, despite his often-outrageous viewpoints, is arguably one of the most oft-heard religious voices in popular culture today. Through his Focus on the Family media empire, Dobson produces daily commentaries that appear widely on television and radio stations across the United States, often times as "public service announcements."
Meanwhile, the UCC's recently released 30-second paid television commercial - produced to underscore the denomination's belief that Jesus didn't turn anyone away - has been rejected by two major television networks for being "too controversial."
"Resistance to our message is formidable," Thomas says, "because we're cutting against the prevailing grain of a society that is afraid of the stranger, suspicious of difference and easily seduced by narrowly defined theological boundaries."The 1.3-million-member United Church of Christ, with national offices in Cleveland, has almost 6,000 local churches in the United States and Puerto Rico. It was formed by the 1957 union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

AARP Bulletin on Social Security

The following is from the AARP bulletin. I don't endorse increasing payroll taxes, but, as the article points out, there are other ways to make the relatively small adjustments required to make social security solvent forever Notably, the Bush Administration's plan doesn't actually address the easily soluble problem at all, since it would sequester much of the revenue and actually cost more. Instead, it is their intention to use the relatively minor problems with social security's funding to further a supply-side right-wing agenda that would put this country even further into stupendous debt. Even many Republicans in Congress are unwilling to endorse such a brazenly risky and irresponsible scheme.

Don’t Mess With Success
There’s nothing wrong with Social Security that a few changes can’t fix
By Merrill Goozner
January 2005

After 65 years Social Security is, like America, facing the challenges of aging. Fewer workers will be paying into the system to support those who receive benefits. By 2040 there will be just two workers for each retiree, compared with more than three today, seriously affecting the solvency of the system. But just how dire is the financial picture? Will Social Security be there for our grandchildren?
Designed to provide a basic income for retirees and their families, Social Security has done remarkably well in achieving that goal and is considered the most successful government program in the nation’s history.
Despite some problems, many analysts maintain there is no crisis and that moderate adjustments can keep the system sound. The most recent Social Security trustees’ report shows that the system can pay all scheduled benefits until 2042. That year, if no changes have been made, benefits would have to be cut about 30 percent to bring payments in line with incoming payroll taxes.
While 2042 may seem far off, experts agree that it’s better to make moderate changes earlier rather than later to avoid the "cliff" of a drastic benefit reduction or a hefty tax increase. Here are some ideas being discussed:
TAXES
The simplest adjustment would be a slight increase in the payroll, or FICA, tax. According to the Social Security trustees, if the tax on wages today were raised by less than 1 percent each for employee and employer (from the current rate of 6.2 percent each), Social Security would be solvent through 2077.
Another proposal is to "pop the cap"—to raise the point at which wages are no longer subject to Social Security taxes. Congress set the level in 1983 to cover 90 percent of all wages. The wage cap today is $90,000. But top earners today have a larger share of the income pie, and the portion subject to tax for Social Security has fallen to 84 percent. Using the projections of the Social Security trustees, raising the wage cap to about $140,000 would provide almost one-third of the requirement for solvency for 75 years.
It’s worth noting that a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based research group, concludes: "If the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent, as the Administration has proposed, their cost over the next 75 years [using Congressional Budget Office projections] will be more than five times the Social Security shortfall over this period."
Another source of payroll taxes could be newly hired public employees. Edith Fierst, a lawyer who was a member of President Clinton’s Social Security Advisory Council, says that currently nearly 7 million local and state employees are not covered by Social Security but rather by employer-operated retirement funds. Bringing new workers into Social Security would help fund the system.
BENEFIT CHANGES
Some adjustments have been made, and more are likely. The rise in the normal retirement age from 65 to 67 already constitutes a benefit cut. And more people are paying taxes on their Social Security benefits. Other changes to benefits could include modifying the cost-of-living adjustment, raising the normal retirement age even higher and calculating a person’s initial benefits using price increases rather than wage increases.
PRIVATE ACCOUNTS
President Bush has declared that he intends to make Social Security reform a priority of his administration, because "the system is not going to be whole for our children or our grandchildren." His solution is to let workers create private accounts using part of their Social Security payroll taxes. Though few specifics have been released, the hope is that private plans invested in the market will generate equal or greater benefits than the traditional Social Security benefits. The risk is that they won’t.
At a time when fewer people have pensions and most individual retirement accounts are already subject to stock market risk, many question if private accounts are a good idea.
"All private accounts do is transform the nature of the benefit," says Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group. If taxes and benefits stay the same, he says, "there’s still a problem." In fact, he and others say that private accounts will only make things worse because they would require benefit cuts and run up huge federal deficits in order to finance the transition.
Proponents of private accounts point to 2018 as the year when Social Security benefits will exceed revenue from FICA taxes and taxes on benefits. That’s when the system will have to use interest earned on its Treasury bonds to pay benefits.
To prepare for this, Congress passed legislation in 1983 that would create a surplus in the Social Security trust fund to help pay for the boomers. As a result, by 2018 the trust fund’s holdings will balloon to $3.7 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion today. This is the boomers’ nest egg.
Backers of private accounts say these trillions aren’t a real asset, since future taxpayers will have to repay the Social Security trust fund . "We don’t pay any attention to the trust fund," says Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a libertarian group in Washington. "We only care about the actual cash flows from the government."
Others disagree. They maintain that the Treasury bonds owned by the trust fund are assets. Says Reischauer, "If Social Security were run like other quasi-governmental agencies like Fannie Mae, which also buy Treasury bonds, there would be no question about repaying the loans."
John Rother, AARP’s director of policy, adds: "Redeeming the trust funds is a sacred commitment, since they represent prior contributions from workers to fund their own benefits. Failing to do so would break the intergenerational compact that’s the foundation of Social Security."
Indeed, if current workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts, the government would have to make up the difference to cover benefits. Estimates for such transition costs range between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over 10 years.
At a time when the government is already running record deficits, many economists worry what the transition costs could do to the overall economy. Says Christian Weller, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research institute based in Washington: "It will lead to higher interest rates that hurt households directly—not abstractly in the future but immediately. You are hurting people today and cutting benefits in the future."
Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, says private accounts may have a role to play. But, he adds, they’re getting too much attention and detracting from other Social Security issues.
"Social Security could do a much better job," he says. "With or without private accounts, it needs to be better targeted to those who are most elderly and truly needy."
Barbara B. Kennelly, head of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, says private accounts change the intent of Social Security. "What the president’s plan does is take Americans out of the community pool, where we share the risk, and put each of us into our own pool of one to fend for ourselves," she says. "That’s fine if you’re rich.
"Of course, we have to make changes in years to come. What we don’t have to do is dismantle the current program to do it."
Merrill Goozner, a Washington-based writer, covered economics for the Chicago Tribune. He wrote The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs. Carol Simons and Susan Crowley contributed to this article.

Krugman on the Greenspan Succession

Here.

Testimonial: If you're reluctant to sign up for the New York Times' online edition, I can tell you there's no real downside. I have not been bombarded with Spam or advertising, and have found the ability to read the news and opinion in the Times invaluable. The same, incidentally, goes for the LA Times and the Washington Post.

Word for the Day

coruscate \KOR-&-skeit\ intransitive verb

1. To give off or reflect bright beams or flashes of light; to sparkle.
2. To exhibit brilliant, sparkling technique or style.

They pulled up at the farthest end of a loop path that looked out over the great basin of the Rio Grande under brilliant, coruscating stars.
--Bill Roorbach, "Big Bend," The Atlantic, March 2001

Beneath you lie two miles of ocean -- a bottomlessness, for all practical purposes, an infinity of blue. ... A thousand coruscating shafts of sunlight probe it, illuminating nothing.
--Kenneth Brower, "The Destruction of Dolphins," The Atlantic, July 1989

What coruscating flights of language in his prose, what waterfalls of self-displaying energy!
--Joyce Carol Oates, review of A Theft, by Saul Bellow, New York Times, March 5, 1989

Whether we know or like it or not, thoseof us who turn our hands to this task are scribbling in a line of succession which, however uncertainly and intermittently, reaches back to the young Macaulay, who first made his public reputation as a coruscating writer in the 1820s.
--David Cannadine, "On Reviewing and Being Reviewed," History Today, March 1, 1999
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Coruscate comes from Latin coruscatus, past participle of coruscare, "to move quickly, to tremble, to flutter, to twinkle or flash." The noun form is coruscation. Also from coruscare is the adjective coruscant, "glittering in flashes; flashing."
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Quite shamelessly stolen from www.wordsmith.org

E-mail to "Say it ain't so" Joe Lieberman

I sent Senator Joe Lieberman, who Josh Marshall is reporting may be about to bolt from the "fainthearted faction," the following e-mail:

Dear Senator Lieberman,
As a concerned citizen on an issue which concerns all Americans, namely President Bush's entirely unfounded and foolish efforts to phase out social security under the phony mantle of "personal accounts," I am concerned about reports that you have not clearly articulated opposition to the President's nefarious albeit thusfar ill-defined plan. I understand you made comments on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" recently which indicate you may be about to do so, and I am writing to encourage you to make clear that you stand with the VAST majority of Democratic leaders and constituents in opposing any plan designed to trump up a phony crisis in order to undermine the most important and successful social program in our nation's history.
Thank you.

David Studhalter

Word for the Day

daube · 'dOb · (French) noun

: a stew of marinated and braised meat, (usually boneless beef), vegetables (including tomatoes), herbs, and spices, typical of Provençal cuisine.

Krugman: No Free Lunch

Here.

Word for the Day

oligopsony · a-li-‘gôp-s&-ni · noun

: a market situation in which each of a few buyers exerts a disproportionate influence on the market

- oligopsonistic · -"gôp-s&-'nis-tik · adjective

Etymology: olig- + Greek opsOnia purchase of victuals, from opsOnein to purchase victuals, from opson food + Oneisthai to buy; see venal

Compare:

monopsony · m&-'näp-s&-nE · noun [plural –nies]

: an oligopsony limited to one buyer

- monopsonistic · -"näp-s&-'nis-tik · adjective

Word for the Day

gormless · 'gorm-l&s · adjective

: chiefly British-- lacking intelligence; stupid

Etymology: alteration of English dialect gaumless, from gaum attention, understanding (from Middle English gome, from Old Norse gaum, gaumr) + -less

Word for the Day

ablate · a-'blEIt · verb
Inflected form(s): ablated; ablating
Noun form: ablation

transitive senses : to remove, especially by cutting,
abrading, or evaporating
intransitive senses : to become ablated; especially :
vaporize

Etymology: Latin ablatus (pp. of auferre to remove), from ab- + latus, past participle of ferre -- compare ukase, bear, tolerate

From The Star King

The following is a brief excerpt, in the form of one of the picturesque pseudo-quotational chapter headings, from The Star King (1963), by Jack Vance, the first of the "Gaean Reach" novels. (The Gaean Reach in the Fifteenth/Sixteenth Century of Space, i.e. A.D. ~3400-3500, is called the Oikumene). This particular passage serves to set the scene for a chapter telling the early life of Kirth Gersen, the protagonist, and how he came to be conducting his deadly serious enterprise in Brinktown.

From "The Wages of Sin," by Stridenko: article in Cosmopolis, May, 1404:

Brinktown: what a city! Once the jumping-off place, the last outpost, the portal into infinity – now just another settlement of the North East Middle Beyond. But "just another"? Is this a fair description? Decidedly not. Brinktown must be seen to be believed, and even then the hard of belief depart incredulous. The houses are set far apart along shaded avenues; still they rise like watchtowers, thrusting up into and through the palms, virebols, scalmettos, and it is a mean house which does not soar above the treetops. The ground level is no more than an entry, a raised pavilion where the clothes must be changed, for local habit ordains the use of paper house capes and paper slippers. Then above: what an explosion of architectural conceits, what turrets and spires, belfries and cupolas! What elaborate magnificence, what inspired scrimshaw, what intricate, inventive, farcical, wonderful applications and misapplications of likely and unlikely materials! Where else can one find balustrades of tortoiseshell studded with gold-plated fish heads? Where else to ivory nymphs hang suspended by their hair from the roof gutters, their faces expressing only bland benediction? Where else can a man’s success be gauged by the sumptuousness of the tombstone he designs for himself and erects in his front yard, complete with panegyrical epitaph? And in fact where but in Brinktown is success such an ambiguous recommendation? Few indeed of the inhabitants dare show themselves within the Oikumene. The magistrates are assassins; the civil guards arsonists, extortioners and rapists; the elders of the council, bordello owners. But civic affairs proceed with a punctilio and gravity worthy of the Grand Sessions at Borugstone, or a coronation at the Tower of London. The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by the civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, and eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads down to the jungle; the prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit: the entire continent is at his disposal. But no prisoner ever ventures far from the gate; and when his presence is required, it is only necessary to unlock the gate and call his name.

Word for the Day

wastrel · 'wAs-tr&l ; 'wäs- · noun

1 : vagabond, waif
2 : one who dissipates resources foolishly and self-indulgently: profligate

Etymology: irregular from waste

Word for the Day

eldritch \EL-drich\ adjective

:strange; unearthly; weird; eerie.

...
In the eldritch light of evening in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the eye plays tricks on the brain.
--Thom Stark, “Something’s Burning,” Boardwatch, November 2000

The immitigable mountains and their stark, eldritch trees; coasts where earth abruptly snapped off, never to be continued, or beaches which gnawed it to bright dust and sucked it gently away....
--Carolyn Kizer, “A Childhood South of Nowhere,” New York Times, April 9, 1989
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Eldritch perhaps derives from a Middle English word meaning “fairyland,” from Middle English elf, “elf” (from Old English aelf) + riche, “kingdom” (from Old English rice, akin to G. reich).
. . .
stolen shamelessly from www.wordsmith.org

Word for othe Day

casuistry · kÄzh-w&-stri; kÄ-zh&- · noun · plural -ries

1 : a resolving of specific cases of conscience, duty, or conduct through interpretation of ethical principles or religious doctrine
2 : specious argument; rationalization, esp. involving the first sense in a negative connotation

From Wikipedia, on the first (non-sinister) sense:

Casuistry (argument by cases) is an attempt to determine the correct response to a moral problem, often a moral dilemma, by drawing conclusions based on parallels with agreed responses to pure cases, also called paradigms. Casuistry is a method of ethical case analysis. Another common everyday connotation is "complex reasoning to justify moral laxity or to forward unspoken agendas."

Casuistry is a branch of applied ethics. It is the standard form of reasoning applied in common law.

Casuistry takes a relentlessly practical approach to morality. Rather than applying theories, it examines cases. By drawing parallels between paradigms, so called "pure cases," and the case at hand, a casuist tries to determine the correct response (not merely an evaluation) to a particular case. The selection of a paradigm case is justified by warrants.

This form of reasoning is the basis of case law in common law.
...
Etymology: casuist; 1609, "one who studies and resolves cases of conscience," from Fr. casuiste, from L. casus. Often in a sinister or contemptuous sense. Casuistry is first attested 1725.

"Casuistry ... destroys, by distinctions and exceptions, all morality, and effaces the essential difference between right and wrong."
[Bolingbroke, 1736]

Word for the Day

etiolate \I-ti-&-LEIT\ transitive verb

1. (Botany) To bleach and alter the natural development of (a green plant) by excluding sunlight.
2. To make pale or sickly.
3. To make weak by stunting the growth or development of.

intransitive verb:

(Botany) To become bleached or whitened, as when grown without sunlight.

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Under that etiolated sky all life seemed wrung out.
--Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia

[They] had feverish eyes, pale faces and gaunt, etiolated bodies from spending all the hours of daylight shut up in cramped and often humid spaces.
--Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse
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Etiolate comes from French étioler, perhaps for s’éteuler, "to become like straw," from Old French esteule, "stubble or straw," from Latin stipula, "a stalk, straw."

NYT's Herbert: Also Right On

See this article.

Krugman Right On Again

See link to today's NYT column.

Word for the Day

vituperation \vy-tu-p&-REI-sh&n, -tyu-\ noun

1. The act or an instance of speaking abusively to or about.
2. Sustained and severely abusive language.

It was a bitter attack on those who had sneered at his father, an astonishingly poised performance for a twenty-six-year-old, and an early demonstration of Bron’s gift for vituperation.
--Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Bron and His ‘Affec. Papa," The Atlantic, May 2001

Everybody was very nice except the Liberal women -- who have a repertoire of vituperation that I cannot believe to be equalled anywhere.
--Bonnie Kime Scott (Editor), Selected Letters of Rebecca West

Ratifying Wylie’s vituperations against the homemaker, feminists have scorned the domestic role and exhorted other women to join them in forsaking it as unworthy of their talents.
--F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility
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Vituperation comes from Latin vituperatio, from the past participle of vituperare, "to blame," from vitium, "a fault" + parare, "to prepare." The verb form is vituperate; the related adjective is vituperative. One who vituperates is a vituperator.
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Remorselessly stolen from Wordsmith.org.

Paul Krugman's detailed analysis of the phony crisis in social security

See link.

Word for the Day

riposte \rih-POST\, noun:

1. A quick thrust given after parrying an opponent’s lunge in fencing.
2. A quick and effective reply by word or act.

intransitive verb:
To make a riposte.

......................................
She had an agile, teasing sense of humor that included a sure grasp of the absurd and an instinct for punchy ripostes.
--Sally Bedell Smith, Diana in Search of Herself

It was an inelegant riposte, especially for one so quick-witted as Neumann.
--Peter Gay, My German Question

When she told him how much she hated being called an old trout, he’d riposte: "The trout is the most beautiful of fish."
--Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg
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Riposte derives from Italian risposta, "an answer," from rispondere, "to answer," from Latin respondere, "to promise in return, to answer," from re- + spondere, "to promise."