The death of investigative journalism

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Ken Silverstein asks why the noble and important tradition of investigative "muckraking" journalism has all but disappeared in the elite media in the 21st Century, and his answer probably won't surprise anyone who has been paying even casual attention to the disastrous state of the corporate-owned mainstream media:

The decline of undercover reporting — and of investigative reporting in general — also reflects, in part, the increasing conservatism and cautiousness of the media, especially the smug, high-end Washington press corps. As reporters have grown more socially prominent during the last several decades, they've become part of the very power structure that they're supposed to be tracking and scrutinizing.

This is the main gist of the Op-Ed, although be sure to read his entire piece to glean his other important insights on the matter.

And he is uniquely qualified to complain about the sad state of affairs journalism has fallen into given he is (along with Seymour Hersh) truly a master of the craft of honest, power-challenging research and reporting. Silverstein's most recent work of undercover, investigative journalism appears in Harper's Magazine, where he examines the way shady DC Public Relations firms go about getting political favors granted to the despotic regimes that are their clients. He approaches APCO, a PR agency that has worked on "image, policy, foreign investment and reputation issues for a host of governments," including dictatorial regimes like Nigeria and Azerbaijan. The firm's "key professionals," was proudly advertised as including former members of Congress and former administration officials. Silverstein introduced himself as working for the fictitious "Maldon Group" with a remit to "improve relations between the newly-elected government of Turkmenistan [a country with an atrocious human rights record] and the US government." He told APCO that he required the services of a firm that could quickly enact a "strategic communications" plan to help achieve this goal.

He later meets up with representatives from the high-powered DC lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates. His article details with nauseating clarity how shameless PR and lobbying firms in the US translate their clients' fees into more favorable diplomatic relations and news coverage for Third World dictatorships. His reporting is deeply disturbing and should be required reading for anyone seriously contemplating a diplomatic career with the State Department. At the end of the day, it's money that talks, not high-minded principles of "respect for human rights" or "commitment to democratic principles."

Neocon Plan: Smashing up the Middle East was and is the whole Point

I hardly count myself a fan of Justin Raimondo or his Paleoconservative/libertarian website antiwar.com, but post, which I happened across at Dissident News, is too good to ignore. The title of the original piece, "Nihilism and Neoconservatism: Brothers under the skin" offers up only the vaguest idea what is being argued here . . . fortunately, Dissident News goes with the longer, more descriptive title of "Neocon Plan: Smashing up the Middle East was and is the whole Point".

I've been going on and on like a broken record for the past four years in arguing that what we are seeing unfold in Iraq is not the result of Bush Administration incompetence, much less evidence of the incompetence of the Neoconservative war architects. No, what is going on is not incompetence but rather the fruition of a sinister, very well-planned and executed plot to sow enough chaos in the Middle East to ensure US hegemony in the region cannot be challenged in a meaningful way. It's Geopolitics 101. (for a good illustration of this theory, frequently termed the "incompetence dodge" by progressives, see this short piece by Norman Solomon)

To quote from Raimondo:

Where will it all end? The goal of the neocons is a U.S.-Israeli-dominated region, patrolled by U.S. troops and divided into a large number of much smaller statelets. With both Iraq and Iran broken down into their constituent ethno-religious parts, the Middle East becomes Lebanon writ large: weak, vulnerable to attack, and easy to control.

A central premise of the "realist" critique of the neoconservative agenda is that it promotes a dangerous instability, which shows that the realists just don't get what neoconservatism in the foreign policy realm – and particularly when it comes to the Middle East – is all about. The idea is to create – and preside over – a condition of permanent instability. There is no better way to justify the permanent presence of U.S. troops and plenty of aid to U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes.

Nihilism and neoconservatism are brothers under the skin, and nothing illustrates this more starkly than the horror unfolding presently in Iraq. It is a war we were lured into by means of a massive and quite artful deception, and its true purpose remains hidden beneath layers of presidential rhetoric and "patriotic" posturing. Yet a big problem for the neocons is that the closer they get to achieving their objective, the more their real agenda is exposed to the light of day – and they run the risk of a major backlash, one that could take an unexpected – and quite ugly – turn. Quite ugly for them, that is, and quite a relief to the rest of us.

Raimondo is slippery here in describing the Neocons' agenda vis-a-vis Israeli domination of the region. It would seem to me that a much stronger argument could be constructed around Israel being a client state of the US in the region that is financed and armed to advance the Hyperpowers' geopolitical interests in the Middle East, especially in ensuring strategic control of energy resources. Frankly, I haven't seen any persuasive evidence that notwithstanding the fact that most of the Neocons happen to be Jewish, that US foreign policy goals in the region currently revolve around furthering Israel's interests as opposed to advancing the US's.

Details emerge behind proposed trade deal (updated)

Some specifics on the until-recently secret, bi-partisan* trade deal of 2007 from Public Citizen. Here's the press release in its entirety (h/t SirotaBlog):

The legal text of changes to several Bush-negotiated NAFTA expansion agreements released today confirms that the essential changes listed by labor unions, environmental, consumer, faith and family farm groups as necessary to avoid their opposition to the free trade agreements were not made, said Public Citizen today.

“Today’s text release confirms that Congress is about to face a vote on yet another Bush NAFTA expansion agreement, because now we can see that unfortunately none of the core NAFTA-CAFTA provisions linked to offshoring and downward pressure on wages so strongly opposed by most congressional Democrats and the American public have been removed even as improved labor and environmental standards have been added on,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division. “It’s like adding a new roof on a condemned building.”

A framework of changes to various Bush trade agreements announced in late March by some Democratic leaders had failed to address the majority of essential changes to the NAFTA-CAFTA model that Democratic base groups had listed this winter as necessary to avoid their opposition to the Bush-negotiated agreements. Some unions, environmental and other groups had awaited the legal text translating the Democrats’ “ask” and a tentative agreement to it by the administration announced May 10, hoping that the legal text would include more essential changes than had been listed in the limited summaries of the negotiations available.

Not one labor union or environmental, consumer, public health, anti-poverty, small business, faith or family farm group supports the deal. The announcement of the deal underlying today’s text came only 100 days after Democrats reclaimed the majority thanks to election of 37 House and Senate candidates who ran against the Bush trade agenda and replaced NAFTA-supporting incumbents.

“The Democratic majority arrived with a fair trade mandate from a public strongly opposed to staying the course on the failed Bush trade agenda,” said Wallach. “It is incomprehensible why any Democrats would ever prioritize reviving Bush trade deals opposed by their entire base and the majority of congressional Democrats over launching their own proactive trade agenda. They should aim instead at addressing the flood of unsafe imported foods and products, the many incentives to off-shore U.S. jobs, the endless ‘trade’ pact attacks on our environmental and safety laws and the nearly $800 billion trade deficit that is slowing U.S. economic growth and threatening global economic stability.”

The legal text fails to address most of the issues raised early this year by unions and other civil society groups as essential fixes. The text:

* Fails to alter the outrageous NAFTA “Chapter 11” foreign investor privileges that create incentives for U.S. firms to move offshore and expose our most basic environmental, health, zoning and other laws – policies strongly advocated for by Democrats – to attack in foreign tribunals.
* Does absolutely nothing to address bans on “Buy America” and anti-offshoring policies that safeguard American jobs and that Democrats have continually fought to expand and preserve.
* Does nothing to fix the Peru FTA terms that would allow Citibank or other U.S. investors providing “private retirement accounts” to sue Peru if the country reverses its failed social security privatization. This deal helps lock Peru into the same privatized social security system that Democrats have been fighting against in the United States.
* Rolls back the most extreme CAFTA-style drug patent rules to NAFTA-era language. However, the NAFTA language itself undermines rights available under World Trade Organization patent rules. Thus, while the amended text is better than CAFTA, it limits developing country trade partners’ rights relative to their status without the new limits that would be imposed by the FTAs, increasing the cost of medicine for our trading partners – costs that Democrats are trying hard to contain for our own healthcare system.
* Fails to change the food import standards as needed so that only food meeting U.S. standards would be allowed.
* Does nothing to address the NAFTA-style farm rules that resulted in 1.3 million Mexican peasant farmers losing their livelihoods. This is predicted to create dislocation and misery for large numbers of people, increase production of cocaine and cause instability in developing country trade partners.

*The Democratic Party's Congressional leadership is finally stepping up to the plate and refusing to rubber stamp the Bush administration and GOP lawmakers' ruinous trade agenda. This diary from DailyKos (6/29) serves up the good news: The Dems are declaring the South Korea and Colombia free trade deals DOA and the House will not approve them; and Presidential "Fast Track", which will expire tomorrow (6/29) will not be renewed.

Nevertheless, for the record . . . just last month (May) the New York Times reported that the Bush administration apparently had the solid political backing from the new Democratic leadership in the House; specifically, a bipartisan "understanding" had been reached, which both sides quickly tried to spin as victories.

Update: This report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy entitled "Behind the Secret Trade Deal: What about Agriculture?" analyzes in great detail how "free" trade deals produce tragic results for farmers and food security both in the U.S. and around the world. And this 3 page brief from the organization's Trade Observatory project is really an invaluable guide to the US's current negotiations with the WTO and the impact the new Farm Bill could have - the Bill is expected to be completed by the end of July.

Weekend news round-up on Iraqi occupation

AP is reporting that two US soldiers have been charged with the premeditated murder of three Iraqis in the village Iskandariyah. The American soldiers are accused of killing three Iraqis in separate incidents, then planting weapons on the victims' remains sometime between April and June of this year.

Perhaps the only silver lining in this tragic scenario is that these crimes were brought to light by some anonymous courageous US soldiers, demonstrating that despite the fact that the war has turned many GIs into sociopaths, many others have been able to maintain the compassion and sanity.

Since it has been a few weeks since I have written at length about the consequences of the tragic occupation of Iraq - both for US soldiers and their families as well as civilians who haven't fled their homeland - I guess this is as good of a time as any to give a semi-comprehensive update for my readers. For starters, be sure to check out this post from blogger Chris Floyd, which discusses the recent American "massacre" at al-Khalis, in which residents of the village claim US soldiers killed 11 Iraqi "village guards" who were cooperating with Coalition forces.

Spokesmen for the US command say that it was al-Qaeda terrorists who were the victims; this all-too-typical situation with radically conflicting statements (see this tragic example in Afghanistan) was as usual resolved by the other news agencies in favor of the Pentagon, uncritically taking the latter's account as the gospel truth. Once again demonstrating that the BBC is a far superior news agency than anything we have in this country, to its credit the Beeb actually independently investigated and reported on the villagers' claims. (For more analysis on Bush's "al-Qaeda in Iraq" propaganda, see this excellent Glenn Greenwald post here and this McClatchy's article)

*AP reports that early Saturday morning, US forces raided into Shiite Sadr City, "presumably challenging Mahdi Army commanders." They killed 26 in the course of the action. The Mahdi Army is loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who calls for a quick US withdrawal from Iraq.

*Editor & Publisher discusses the Bushies' new propaganda tactic of using the term "al-Qaeda" as a means of describing the guerrilla movement among Sunni Arabs in Iraq, even though experts of the insurgency argue that the resistence is mainly comprised of local, homegrown fighters rather than foreign-born Sunni al-Qaeda Jihadists. In fact, as this report from CNN earlier this month points out, US forces have been arming nationalist guerrillas and former Saddam Hussein loyalists -- and coordinating tactics -- in a marriage of convenience against al Qaeda radicals in one of Iraq's most violent provinces.

*McClatchy's Washington Bureau (which provides what is probably the most authoritative coverage of the occupation of any of the large wire services) reports that on Thursday (6/28) in the city of Baghdad alone, 25 civilians were killed and 40 injured in a parked car bomb explosion; 12 civilians were wounded by the explosion of a mortar shell, two car bombs killed at least two Iraqi civilians; at least, 4 people were killed and 10 wounded in a parked car bomb; a road side bomb exploded near Al Tobchi not far from Ibn Haian bridge targeting a U.S. military convoy - injuring two Iraqi civilians.

Additionally, a road side bomb exploded in Bayaa targeting a U.S. military convoy. 2 Iraqi civilians were injured; One civilian was killed and 1 was injured when gunmen in a speeding car started shooting randomly at people in Amil neighborhood; and an IED exploded in Doura neighborhood, injuring 3 civilians.

The previous day (Wednesday, 6/27), at least 60 Iraqis were killed, including 14 in a late-night car bombing near a Shiite shrine in the capital.

Another great source of news/links is IraqSlogger, which describes in excruciating detail some of the other "developments" throughout the country yesterday (Friday):

Baghdad - Fifteen bodies shot execution style were found in different parts of the capital over the last 24 hours, police said. Five of them were found in the Karkh sector of western Baghdad (two in Saidiya, one in Dora, and one in Shu’la), and two others were found in the Rusafa sector of eastern Baghdad (one in Baghdad Al-Jedida and another in Jisr Diyala).

In Baghdad – Four people were killed in an overnight mortar attack on the Fadhl district of central Baghdad and 10 others were wounded in four other mortar strikes in different parts of the city, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Seven mortar rounds hit the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad on Friday afternoon, police said. Eyewitnesses said they heard several powerful blasts and warning sirens and they saw smoke billows rising from different parts of the area, which houses Iraqi government buildings, as well as U.S. and British embassies and the residences of Iraqi politicians.

Additionally, gunmen killed a man and three women in the Saidiya district of southern Baghdad on Friday, according to residents; U.S. troops killed one person in the Rashad district of eastern Baghdad on Friday, police said. No details were given on the incident; Five U.S. soldiers were killed and seven wounded on Thursday night in a roadside bomb attack on their patrol followed by clashes with insurgents in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

In Baquba – Iraqi security forces detained 22 suspected insurgents and discovered 20 buildings rigged with explosives during security operations in Ba’quba (57 km north east of Baghdad) on Friday, a security source said. The source said several mistakes were made during the operation when U.S. helicopters mistakenly bombed several houses in the city.

In Khalis – The mayor of Khalis said dozens of suspected Al-Qaeda militants have been deployed in areas north of Khalis in preparation to attack the town after they fled Ba’quba because of an ongoing security operation, adding that residents were told to protect themselves because there was no Iraqi security presence in the area.

In Khalis – Gunmen roaming the streets of Khalis killed a man and wounded his wife on Friday. Gunmen also killed two ice cube vendors in the nearby village of Khuwaylis, police said.

In Muqdadiah– Militants in several vehicles planted explosives inside the Rahman mosque and detonated it following Friday prayers in Muqdadiya north east of Baghdad, residents said.

In Haswa – Militants blew up a pipeline supplying fuel to a power station in Baghdad on Friday near Hawsa (50 km south of Baghdad), police said.

In Mishada – A suicide truck bomber blew up a train station near a police checkpoint in the town of Mishahda north of Baghdad on Friday, killing eight people, including six soldiers, and wounding five others, police said.

In Balad – The Iraqi army found three bodies shot execution style on the main road between Balad and Dujail (80 km north of Baghdad) on Friday, police said.

In Tikrit - Three people were seriously wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in Tikrit (175 km north of Baghdad) on Friday, police said.

In Mosul – Gunmen killed three women in two separate incidents in Mosul on Friday, police said; One insurgent was killed and two were detained in Mosul following a clash with police, the police said.

In Tal Afar– Gunmen killed two policemen and two soldiers and wounded nine others in an attack with roadside bombs and small arms fire in Tala’far west of Mosul on Thursday evening, police said.

In Kirkuk - One policeman was killed and two others wounded when gunmen opened fire on them in three separate attacks in Kirkuk (250 km north of Baghdad) on Friday, police said.

In Taza – Police killed a suspected militant and detained six others during a raid in Taza south of Kirkuk on Thursday night, police said. A policeman was also killed in the raid.

In Tuz Khurmato – Gunmen killed a truck driver and kidnapped two others who were delivering construction material for a bridge in the Sarha village south of Tuz Khurmatu that was destroyed earlier.

In Fallujah- U.S. forces said they killed three suspected insurgents and detained 26 others during raids to the west and south of Baghdad and in Mosul (390 km north of Baghdad), the U.S. military said.

In Haqlinayh – A roadside bomb explosion targeting a U.S. military patrol damaged a Humvee vehicle in Haqlaniya near Haditha (170 km west of Ramadi) on Friday, eyewitnesses said.

In Kut - The body of a university professor shot several times in the head and the neck was found beside the river in the Azza district of Kut (170 km southeast of Baghdad), police said. The professor worked at the Baghdad University and was on a visit to his relatives in Kut on Thursday when he was abducted by gunmen in three vehicles; Ten unidentified bodies were buried in Kut on Friday after they were discovered in the Tigris River near Suwaira, police said. The bodies were all found headless and some were in military uniform, the source said. Also, one woman was wounded after a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. patrol in Kut, police said.

In Basrah – Gunmen attacked the British embassy compound in Basrah (590 km south of Baghdad) on Friday morning with small arms fire, a British military spokesman said. The source added that all three British bases in Basrah were hit with indirect fire over the last 24 hours without casualties.

Reuters reports that "The US military said it had uncovered 35 to 40 bodies in a mass grave south of Falluja, in Iraq's Sunni dominated Anbar province. [. . .] The military said the killings were relatively recent and the bodies had been bound and bore gunshot wounds." (h/t Atrios)

Via Matthew Yglesias, there is an interesting argument put forward by Steven Cook, Roy Takeyh and Suzanne Maloney in the International Herald Tribune that we don't necessarily have to fear a regional war breaking out across the Middle East if we leave Iraq (or, as I would formulate it, when our troops inevitably withdrawal). The authors makes some good points, but I still don't feel comfortable accepting the silver lining predictions.

Ace political journalist Dan Froomkin, blogging at his home perch at the Washington Post analyzes the tragic consequences of the Bushies' arrogance and delusional thinking (h/t AmericaBlog). Besides a disastrous policy (i.e. "Cut and Run"), the president is now witnessing mass defections from his formerly loyal GOP minions who are finally being forced to acknowledge our failed surge plan and the need to bring the occupation to a conclusion.

Quoting from the article:

Bush and Vice President Cheney's optimistic predictions about the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have proved to be almost completely and consistently wrong for years now. ("Last throes," anyone?) Before the 2006 election, White House political guru Karl Rove was supremely self-assured in his public predictions of Republican victory.

White House spokesman Tony Snow recently assured the press corps that Bush had enough votes in the Senate on the immigration bill. "I'll see you at the bill signing," Bush himself told a skeptical journalist on June 11. Bush and his staff's credibility regarding statements of "fact" is a frequent subject of debate. But their track record on predictions is something else entirely. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that those predictions are unreliable.

I mention this because Bush's core argument against a troop drawdown in Iraq -- something supported by a large majority of Americans -- is basically a prediction. As he put it again yesterday: "If we withdraw before the Iraqi government can defend itself, we would yield the future of Iraq to terrorists like al Qaeda -- and we would give a green light to extremists all throughout a troubled region. The consequences for America and the Middle East would be disastrous."

But as AmericaBlog's Joe Sudbay darkly notes: "The consequences for America and the Middle East have already been disastrous because Bush was wrong. Based on Bush's track record, these latest predictions on Iraq aren't going to be accurate either."

*h/t to Professor Juan Cole, always a good source of information regarding the Iraqi occupation.

Update: And in the "don't hold your breath" department, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives will vote in July on legislation to withdraw almost all American troops from Iraq by April."

Update #2: Tom Engelhardt gives us Iraq by the numbers.

Update #3: A particularly tragic update, AP reports that "A suicide truck bomber blasted a Shiite town north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing more than 100 people."

The National Review cruise: One journalist's account

This is one of the more hilarious and interesting explorations of the Conservative mindset I have read in awhile. The setting is a National Review cruise ship, and the tale is recounted in loving gonzo-style detail by British journalist Johann Hari in the July issue of The New Republic:

The very first paragraph, we are treated to this spectacular display of ignorance and bigotry:

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. "Is he your only child?" I ask. "Yes," she answers. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks me. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

Describing dinner one night aboard the ship, Hari recounts:

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parker, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. "You must live near the U.N. building," the Floridian says to one of the ladies after the entrée is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. "They should suicide-bomb that place," he says. They all chuckle gently.

The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you're a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she's visited. Her companion adds, "I went to Paris, and it was so lovely." Her face darkens: "But then you think--it's surrounded by Muslims." The first lady nods: "They're out there, and they're coming." Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, "Down the line, we're not going to bail out the French again." He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, "I can't hear you, Jacques! What's that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can't hear you!"

Now that this barrier has been broken--everyone agrees the Muslims are devouring the French, and everyone agrees it's funny--the usual suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is "almost a traitor." John McCain is "crazy" because of "all that torture." One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to "thank God for Fox News." As the wine reaches the Floridian, he sits back and announces, "This cruise is the best money I ever spent."

But the most revealing insight into Conservative "thinking" aboard the USS Neocon is:

All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public--that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich--are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won't let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. "It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'?" Dinesh D'Souza asks angrily. "The left won by demanding America's humiliation." On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D'Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers."

The panel nods, but it doesn't want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them."

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, "The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts." The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, "I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not."

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, "The election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next." This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

Hari goes on to describe fairly significant ideological battle royale that ends up breaking out between National Review founder and publisher William F. Buckley and Norman Podhoretz, whom he describes with some sarcasm as "two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party." Hari explains:

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National Review in 1955--when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction--and he has always been skeptical of appeals to "the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

Check out the whole article if you're looking for a bit of a laugh. Just don't laugh too hard; after all, these lunatics are currently running the country after all is said and done.

Update: Also, check out this column by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair online, this post from dKos and this satirical "schedule of events" courtesy of liberal blog Crooked Timber.

Debate at TPM Cafe on China's "soft power"

The Book Club over at TPMCafe debates the importance of China's role in the global political and economic order. The discussion centers around Josh Kurlantzick's "Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World."

In the book, Kurlantzick argues that China has been quietly building it's international prestige by building relationships around the world with soft power. He argues that unless this "charm offensive" is noted and responded to, China will become an international power to rival the U.S. in relative short order.

As Daniel Drezner, hawking his recently published book "All Politics is Global", correctly notes: "The prospect of a billion potential consumers has a funny effect on multinational corporations. Regardless of the firm -- be it Google or NewsCorp -- firms will throw out any non-profit-related principle to guarantee a crack at the Chinese marketplace. That said, market power cuts both ways. The most important lever of influence on Chinese economic behavior will not be Western producers, but Western consumers (and, by extension, Western regulators)."

NYC's labor laws are being inadequately enforced

City Limits discusses a new report (.pdf) released by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice entitled "Unregulated Work in the Global City."

The Brennan Center, which is affiliated with NYU's School of Law, reports that "thousands of workers in New York City – from payroll staff in high-end restaurants to undocumented immigrants helping to build new housing – aren’t earning minimum wage or overtime pay."

And on top of the egregious minimum wage and overtime violations – researchers at the Center "identified a string of other common violations" ranging from "slippery floors and unpaid meal breaks to outright human trafficking." (Emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, New York's low-wage occupations are by and large concentrated in the service sector. According to City Limit's reporting, causes for these very troubling trends vary from sector to sector. The research tied labor problems in home health care and child care, for instance to the fact that most of these services are paid through public funds such as Medicaid, tying their low wages to diminishing public funds for such services. On the other hand, in security, janitorial and laundry work, most clients don't pay the workers directly, instead making payments to firms or individuals who originally contracted or subcontracted the jobs. This, in turn, makes it difficult to trace responsibility for wages.

There are, of course, always bad actors in the business world; unscrupulous employers, dishonest contractors, abusive managersm etc. So perhaps the most troubling problem is the fact that labor law enforcement has plummeted, according to the Center's analysis of federal labor department data. According to the report:

Even as the number of American workers covered by labor law increased by 55 percent from 1975 to 2004, the same period saw a 14 percent reduction in investigations staff and a 36 percent drop in completed compliance actions. The New York state labor department employed about 100 investigators for the half-million workplaces in the state during the study.

All eyes are on Governor Spitzer, who built up his political career by fighting the good fight to ensure workers' rights, to institute much-needed reform in this area. The New York State legislature also has its work cut out for it: According to the author of the Brennan Center report, not only are labor laws not being enforced, the laws on the books are also hopelessly outdated and ineffective in the first place.

Details of CIA’s domestic spying operations made public

The New York Times reports that "Long-secret documents released [this week] provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago." (The documents can be read online here)

Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A. [see here for more background -ed.]

The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period.

Interestingly, the Times cites intelligence experts such as Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive who argue that the release of these documents was intended to distract from the current controversies.

The reader is reminded that "Historians have generally concluded that far from being a rogue agency, the C.I.A. was following orders from the White House or top officials. In 1967, for instance, President Lyndon B. Johnson became convinced that the American antiwar movement was controlled and financed by Communist governments, and he ordered the C.I.A. to produce evidence." It's difficult to generalize too much here, however, as the CIA has indeed historically been involved in unauthorized clandestine operations as well (see here, here and here for starters).

There are some juicy revelations here - not necessarily new revelations mind you, it just happens to be the first time they are essentially being corroborated by US intelligence agencies themselves - such as Operation CHAOS (where the CIA went undercover to spy on the New Left) and n conjunction with the FBI attempts to spy on John Lennon and other "trouble-makers". Another interesting "discovery" confirmed by the document release:

A rare gem among the documents for C.I.A. buffs is a pair of detailed reports signed by James J. Angleton, the legendary chief of the agency’s counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974. They describe an American program to create and exploit foreign police forces, internal-security services and counterterrorism squads overseas.

The documents explain that the C.I.A. and other American agencies trained and equipped foreigners to serve their countries — and, in secret, the United States. Once the Americans had set up a foreign service, it could help carry out American foreign policy by suppressing communists and leftists, and gather intelligence on behalf of the C.I.A.

According to recently declassified government documents, CIA programs "trained hundreds of thousands of foreign military and police officers in 25 countries by the early 1960s."

For previous Troubled Times posts on this subject, see here, here and here.

Update: More analysis from Bob Woodward writing over at the Washington Post, specifically on what the newly declassified documents reveal about the CIA's role in Watergate, and former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms' attempts at covering the scandal up. According to the formerly-great investigative reporter:

This was the Watergate-era CIA, with Helms ever serving the president, ever mindful, as Richard M. Nixon's secret White House tapes later revealed, that the president wanted the full story of Watergate locked away in government safes forever. And the CIA's role in that coverup was always one of the murkiest parts of the story. As Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.), the vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, famously said at the time, the role of the CIA in the scandal was like "animals crashing around in the forest -- you can hear them but you can't see them."

Update #2: The Nation asks about the status of the CIA's "missing jewels".

Update #3: David Swanson reports on a NSA whistleblower's confession about her agency's spying on fellow American citizens.

Update #4: Foreign Policy Magazine interviews Steven Aftergood from FAS about the significance of the CIA revelations.

Update #5: Interviewed by Amy Goodman in Truthdig, national hero Daniel Ellsberg says that now's the time for a new "Pentagon Papers" release:

The equivalent of the Pentagon Papers exist in safes all over Washington, not only in the Pentagon, but in the CIA, the State Department and elsewhere. My message is to them: Take the risk, reveal the truth under the lies of your own bosses and your superiors, obey your oath to the Constitution, which every one of those officials took, not to the commander in chief, but to the Constitution of the United States.

(see here for more background on the Pentagon Papers)

OECD acknowledges "dark side" of globalization

Reuters reports that even the neoliberal "free" market fundamentalists over at the Paris-based OECD (basically a lobbying group for the world's thirty wealthiest countries) are finally being forced to admit what has been noted by critics for decades: Globalization's victims do face significant negative consequences even as the "winners" of the great game profit from their exploitative trade and economic development policies. In a policy briefing (.pdf) released by the international agency earlier this month, it is acknowledged that:

[W]hile trade raises overall income and welfare, some workers may lose from globalisation. This is most evident in the case of workers displaced from sectors that contract in the face of import competition. And it is little consolation to someone who has just lost their job that overall living standards are rising in their country, or that new jobs are being created in other sectors.

However, what is even more eye-opening is the fact that the authors' are essentially acknowledging that even if globalisation has not created an overall shortage of jobs (a conclusion that in fact does have a good deal of supporting empirical evidence for, but the OECD doesn't seem to necessarily agree with), workers may have had to make concessions on wages or working conditions to remain employed. According to the briefing: "One indication this may have happened is that the wage share of national income has declined since 1980 in most OECD countries. This means that average wage growth has not been keeping pace with the growth in labour productivity, even as trade and FDI have grown rapidly. This is consistent with globalisation having eroded the bargaining power of workers."

So now it's official: Due to globalization, income inequality in both the Global North and Global South is growing more pronounced, and wage growth is occuring at a slower rate than worker productivity in the US. Nevertheless, the OECD is still singing its old, protectionist "free" trade tune, only pausing ever so briefly in order to acknowledge the inconvenient truths exposed by its own data about how globalization also hurts workers. So, for example, we get this incongruous advice from the OECD:

"The 'job for life' is dead. In order to reap the benefits of globalisation you have to move. Enterprises have to move into new areas, new niches, and people have to move into new enterprises . . .The thing now is to protect people, but not protect jobs, because some jobs have no future."

Or, as the author of the report puts it: "Governments [need] to resist protectionist responses and instead adapt employment policies to help people move from one job to another with greater ease and sense of security." We are helpfully reminded that globalization is inevitable, a net positive for most people (just not the lower and middle class workers or people in the Developing World) and we should all stop complaining and learn to enjoy the exciting instability and inequality the 21st Century clearly has in store for us. Or, as the Reuters article reports:

According to the OECD report, governments had to address public concern over jobs and pay in a world being transformed at unprecedent speed by technology, cheap transport and communications and the rise of China, Russia, India and Brazil and vast pools of cheap labour.

According to the report's author: "[Globalization] is still a win-win process for all countries, But just because markets are good for growth, not wanting to see these vulnerabilities would be counter-productive."

For some background on how corporate globalization (i.e. led by multinational corporations) negatively impacts local economies - as well as leading to job losses and declining labor protections - see this 2002 United Nations study (.pdf) here. The study pays particular attention to Latin American economies.

Also, see this article from the most recent issue of the Boston Review - "Inequality Matters: Why Globalization doesn't Lift All Boats" by Nancy Birdsall from the Center for Global Development. The full report the article was based on can be read here.

How to move forward from EFCA's failure

Sadly, the Senate voted against passing the pro-worker, pro-Middle Class Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The law would have provided significant protections for employees to create or join a union at their place of work and prevent management's widespread use of threats, intimidation and outright firings in response to union activities. The importance of this bill, and the significance of its not being passed, is difficult to overestimate. That's because it's not just about the rights of union members (which makes up an increasingly smaller sliver of the total workforce population in the US) but about the economic security of the entire Middle Class. Writing in Alternet, Amy Traub from the Drum Major Institute notes that:

[U]nions not only helped to create the American middle class in the last century, they continue to propel millions of Americans into the middle class today, empowering members to demand jobs that are capable of sustaining a middle-class standard of living, with dignified wages, leave policies, health care, and retirement plans. Not surprisingly, as union membership has declined over the past decades, the middle-class squeeze has intensified. Giving more Americans the choice to join a union would be a significant step toward rebuilding the American middle class and alleviating the squeeze.

According to jourbnalist Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect, the EFCA legislation "not only speaks about the economic stagnation of all but the wealthiest Americans but that would actually begin to end it. The goal of the Employee Free Choice Act is simply to give workers the right to join unions without facing the (currently) one-in-five chance of being fired for playing an active role in a campaign to do so."

He adds that research has shown 51% of employers illegally threaten workers with the specter of plant closings if employees choose to unionize, and even when workers vote to unionize, companies can refuse to bargain with them and can drag out the process for years. He contrasts the Right's opposition to EFCA with its support for building a fence on the US-Mexican border: Both proposals would ostensibly improve the economic security of ordinary, Middle Class workers but the latter is less feasible and would be less effective than implementing the former.

Bill Scher, blogging at TomPaine, detailed the sad death of EFCA at the hands of the GOP in Congress. Today (June 26th), Senate conservatives filibustered and then killed the legislation with 51 Senators (including all Democrats, both independents and Arlen Specter) voting in support and 48 Republicans casting their votes to kill it.

Also writing in TomPaine, John Logan explains that The House of Representatives had already passed the bill by a vote of 241-185 on March. According to Senate rules, however, supporters of the legislation need a supermajority of 60 votes to invoke cloture (i.e., to end the filibuster). Thus, Congress will likely take no further action on the bill until after the 2008 elections.

Logan asks:

So what are the prospects for the enactment of EFCA? Past experience suggests that the window of opportunity, if it does emerge after the 2008 elections, will be brief, so action will need to be swift—immediately after the first 100 days in office. EFCA supporters must enlist the assistance of as many non-labor allies as possible, and frame the debate in broad terms, stressing that unions and collective bargaining—which greatly expand access to employer healthcare and pension schemes—are critical to restoring the American Dream and revitalizing the imperiled middle-class.

Update: Over at the AFL-CIO blog, James Parks reports that despite the setback in the Senate yesterday, political and union leaders are declaring that the fight for EFCA is not over. He states that "An array of political and union leaders made it clear the momentum is growing for this legislation and that it’s a matter of when, not if, this bill becomes law." I don't think this so wildly optimistic to be unreasonable, although Parks acknowledges that a necessary pre-condition is to elect a new Senate next year that will shepherd the bill through - and elect a new president who won't veto it.

He also has some great statements from union leadership and several Democratic presidential candidates, including Edwards, Obama and Dodd.

Update (6/30):Over at MyDD, Shai Sachs asks what pro-labor progressives can/should be doing between now and November 2008 to support organized labor. He has some good ideas, foremost among them strengthening the National Labor Relations Act.

The cost of "free" trade subsidies

Oxfam International has released a study which finds that US subsidies to its domestic cotton producers is directly responsible for artificially depressing cotton prices, costing West African cotton growers and their families millions of dollars a year and draining the financial resources necessary for child healthcare and education. The entire report can be read at Oxfam's website here (.pdf)

Specifically, the study found that with a complete removal of U.S. cotton subsidies, the world price of cotton would increase by at least 6-14%; prices that West African farmers would receive for their cotton would increase by 5-12%, and their household income would increase by 2.3-5.7%.

And according to Oxfam, this increase would translate into enough money being available to cover all the health care costs of four to ten individuals for an entire year, or schooling costs for one to ten children, or a one-year supply of food for one or two children.

As the president of Oxfam USA stated in response to his organization's findings: "This data clearly exposes the hypocrisy of [US trade] policies, giving international aid with one hand and taking with the other through unfair trade rules.” For more on the Farm Bill, see this report from the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy here.

Canada's Globe & Mail has a fantastic editorial on the hypocrisy of not only the US, but of the Canadian and European governments pointing their fingers at the Global South - and ignoring their own responsibility in causing the Doha global trade talks to collapse.

Noting the tone set by the renewal of generous subsidies to multi-millionaire family farms and agribusiness, columninst Barrie McKenna argues that:

If the world's richest and most powerful country can't see fit to reform its system, the more fragile developing world isn't likely to dismantle its own trade barriers.

The Bush administration, many members of Congress and the United States' trading partners know that the U.S. farm subsidy regime must be overhauled. The subsidies - roughly $18-billion (U.S.) a year - badly distort global trade in key crops, encourage overproduction, condemn farmers in the developing world to poverty and benefit mainly a small elite of already wealthy farmers and landowners. Several key U.S. crop support programs are almost certainly illegal under World Trade Organization rules.

Members of Congress now drafting a new farm bill chose to ignore all that, voting to perpetuate and even enhance the status quo. The 2002 farm bill will wind up costing taxpayers $75-billion over five years. The next one could cost $88-billion. So why point fingers at the developing world [for the collapse of trade talks]?

In addition, be sure to read Anuradha Mittal's analysis in Foreign Policy in Focus "Free Trade Doesn't Help Agriculture."

Guardian Op-Ed: Iraq was all about the oil

David Strahan has a good op-ed in The Guardian (UK) in which he puts forth the argument that the US and UK launched the Iraq war to address its fears of future oil shortages. In other words, the culprit here is peak oil.

Says Strahan:

In a world of looming shortage, Iraq represented a unique opportunity. With 115bn barrels, it had the world's third biggest reserves, and after years of war and sanctions they were the most underexploited. In the late 1990s, production averaged about 2m barrels, but with the necessary investment its reserves could support three times that. In a report to the security council, UN inspectors warned in January 2000 that sanctions had caused irreversible damage to Iraq's reservoirs. But sanctions could not be lifted with Saddam still in place.

And then there is this strange "coincidence" which I had never heard of before:

Blair's commitment to support the attack [on Iraq] dates back to his summit with Bush in Texas in April 2002. What is less well known is that at the same summit, Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent liaison dedicated to "energy security and diversity". Its existence was only later exposed through a freedom of information inquiry. Both governments refuse to release minutes of Dialogue meetings, but one paper dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to more than 50m barrels a day. So on the eve of the invasion, UK and US officials were discussing how to raise production from the region - and we are invited to believe this is coincidence.

Indeed.

Fred Thompson defends lobbying track record

Besides his acting career, GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson has spent most of his adult life working as a corporate lobbyist, which is what it is. I suppose if your client list contained worthwhile non-profit organizations, companies that make life-saving medicines etc, it wouldn't be all that difficult to justify to oneself and one's family and friends that you are engaged in a worthwhile, respectable career.

But the problem in this case is that Thompson's clientele have tended to be ridiculously shady operators, which makes his current public defense of his previous work as well as his claims that he is, in fact, proud of being a paid mouthpeace for thuggish dictators like the deposed Aristide of Haiti whom he managed to fit in to his busy schedule in between holding political offices and acting gigs - well, a little odd. (It also explains why Thompson, the not yet declared presidential candidate, was quite fine at the time with the mass media's purposeful decision not to scrutinize, or in some cases even mention those 20 apparently insignificant years of the former Senator's professional life, For one thing, this self-imposed media blockade let Thompson further cultivate his image as a down-home-at-the-ranch good ole boy; a regular working Joe just like you and me!)

And there's this delicious negget from the AP report: "Thompson, who likes to cast himself as a political outsider, earned more than $1 million lobbying the federal government for more than 20 years. He lobbied for a savings-and-loan deregulation bill that helped hasten the industry's collapse and a failed nuclear energy project that cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars."

No surprise, really, that Thompson is not been keen as of late to discuss his former career as a high priced liar-for-hire tp unethical corporations and political leaders alike.

Written earlier this month in the Huffington Post, David Sirota fittingly labeled Thompson "K Street's Presidential Candidate" owing primarily to his track record of passionately lobbying for those issues near and dear to the hearts of Big Money interests; for example, his "trumpeting new corporate tax breaks as the centerpiece of his nascent campaign."

Im certainly not taking Thompson overly seriously as a presidential candidate, although the danger seems to be that an awful amount of Americans are in fact taking his candidacy rather seriously.

George Will owes his readers an apology

I get Newsweek mailed to my home every week for free (courtesy of my inlaws) and I actually read dishonest hack George Will's latest column this afternoon . . . and nearly threw up halfway through it.

Will's column basically makes the argument that Michael Bloomberg - what has specifically stated he will not run for president next year - is a flip-flopper and has no shot at winning the White House. No argument from me on either of these two points.

But incredibly, in trying to make his case Will states that:

The most consequential American third-party candidate was Ralph Nader in 2000. But for his 97,488 votes in Florida, which George W. Bush won by 537 votes, Al Gore probably would be finishing his second term. But even successful independent or third-party candidates have one thing in common: They lose.

A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice -- e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the '60s tumults.

Progressive watchdog group Media Matters points out what anyone who knows anything at all about the Civil Rights Era already knows: Wallace was a hard-core racist whose campaign was specifically built around opposing desegregation and the Civil Rights Acts!

Will and the editors at Newsweek owe all of its subscribers an apology for printing this offensive garbage. For a pundit who prides himself on his precision and mastery of the English language, it is difficult for me to understand how his throwaway sentences on Wallace's legacy are supposed to be taken as anything other than offensive to those who gave their lives fighting for civil rights in the 50s and 60s. I've said my piece on the magazine's website and you can do so as well here.

*This post is the second part in the series "George Will Sucks". (Part one is here)

Media Matters' complete dossier on Will is here.

Update: Courtesy of PBS's website, here are some timeless quotes from that historic candidate who "gave a voice to an aggrieved minority" of racist southerners. A link to the network's excellent documentary on Wallace is here.

Historian Rick Perlstein has a thorough takedown on Will and his ignorant editorial here. I think he really sums it up best: "A sickening man named George Will has just laundered the historical reputation of a monster."

The Iraq war architects and cheerleaders: Where are they now?

I'm not sure how old this post at Think Progress is, but I've just had the chance to read through it and it will be an important resource for future historians who are trying to understand just how unserious Americans really are when it comes to foreign policy and holding key members of the Bush administration's "key decision-making apparatus."

Along with a similarly brilliant, must-read report from Radar Online published back in January which revealed how pro-war cheerleaders among the media punditocracy (e.g. Tom Friedman, David Brooks, etc) have only seen their reputations burnished, as opposed to diminished, due to their dishonesty and shameless stenography for the war-makers, Think Progress applies the case study method here with impressive results.

For example. Wolfowitz was nominated by Bush to head up the World Bank - a job he ultimately lost due to his incompetence. Feith was rewarded for his “developing, producing, and then disseminating deceptive intelligence that contradicted the consensus of the Intelligence Community" with a post at Georgetown University - where apparently without irony - he is teaching a course “on the Bush Administration’s strategy behind the war on terrorism.”

Other "architects" such as Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness himself, work at the Right-Wing American Enterprise Institute where he spends his days pretending with a straight face to somehow be an expert on national security and defense issues. Then there are lowlifes like Elliot Abrams and David Wurmser who were promoted within the national security bureaucracy by Bush despite the fact that they played such key roles in pushing for the Iraq invasion in the first place.

Update: The original post by Think Progress was put out in April 2006, and an update to the original can be read here.

There was also an interesting article in Vanity Fair's print edition last year that had numerous architects of the war like Perle admit on record that the war was a disaster but downplay their role in precipitating it. I blogged about the article and Perle's reaction to it back in November.

Pro-North bias seen at ICSID

The non-profit global news agency Inter Press Service (IPS) has a troubling report on its website today about a little-know World Bank-affiliated agency called the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), "that mediates disputes between sovereign nations and foreign investors". Turns out that a review by the Institute for Policy Studies and Food and Water Watch (report in .pdf here) of the agency's pending cases and "other independent analyses of the tribunals", the agency is biased toward corporation based in the Developed World (i.e. Global North).

In evaluating the fairness of any agency that arbitrates in significant legal disputes, one would expect some balance among the judges who make up the decision-making body. But in this case, there is no balance. From the article, we learn that among the 300 judges adjudicating 111 pending cases, only 63 (22%) came from developing nations.

So it's really no great surprise that "earlier this year, citing suspicions of favouritism, three Latin America nations -- Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua -- announced their intention to withdraw from the ICSID." The core of the problem here is that "developing countries have their hands tied by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, which force them to abide by the rulings of the ICSID and other arbitration forums." (emphasis added)

"The system is set up in a way that's so prejudiced against governments, and it gives corporations the power of sovereign governments," said Sara Grusky, co-author of the report. "Governments cannot file cases. Multinational corporations are having a hard time in the domestic court system. So this is a way to give them special court system that they can use.

According to the study linked to above: "74 percent of concluded and pending cases were filed against "middle-income developing countries" and 19 percent against "low-income developing countries". Only 1.4 percent of all cases were filed against nations from the powerful Group of Eight most industrialised nations."

In addition: "ICSID tribunals have ruled in favour of the investor and ordered the government to pay compensation in nearly 70 percent of cases -- many of which carry hefty penalties."

Something is obviously way off-kilter here. It is theoretically possible, of course, that most of the rulings are fair and that the large corporations in the Global North happen to have the legal high ground in these disputes. But the statistics presented in this study - and the biased makeup of the tribunals - are at the very least cause for serious concern.

Back in Cape May

This week, my wife, newborn son and I are joining my inlaws, parents, sister, brother-in-law and brother for some fun at the beach in Cape May, New Jersey. My parents rent a house a couple of blocks from the ocean in June every year (I've been coming to Cape May since I was six months old) and I'm planning on soaking up as much R&R as possible. So far, the weather is cooperating quite nicely. I do have some posts that I'm working on that will hopefully get published at some point soon. . .

ISOG, Bush and Black Ops in the Middle East

Writing at the Centre for Research on Globalization* Michel Chossudovsky reports on the CIA's continuing clandestine "Black Ops" campaign in Iran, Lebanon and Syria (see this previous post from Troubled Times on other ongoing CIA Black Ops efforts in Iran.)

Discussing the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG), Chossudvsky notes that US foreign policy toward these two countries (which US Congress has not declared war with) has had the stated objective to wreck both countries' economies and currency systems. ISOG, integrated by officials from the White House, the State Department, the CIA and the Treasury Department, had a mandate to destabilize Syria and Iran, and bring about "Regime Change." Quoting from the Boston Globe (5/25/07 and linked to above), he notes that "The [committee] met weekly throughout much of 2006 to coordinate actions such as curtailing Iran's access to credit and banking institutions, organizing the sale of military equipment to Iran's neighbors and supporting forces that oppose the two regimes." (emphasis added)

Despite statements from the Bushies that the highly controversial ISOG program has been dismantled, Chossudvosky maintains that this decision (if it can be believed) is largely "cosmetic."

Most of these intelligence operations remain intact. ISOG was one among several covert initiatives to destabilize Iran and Syria. Regime change and outright war are still part of the Administration's agenda. In fact, destabilizing covert intelligence operations directed against Iran and Syria have been stepped up in the course of the last four years. Moreover, these operations are closely coordinated with Israeli and NATO war plans, which constitute an integral part of the US sponsored military operation directed against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

Additionally, he notes that "[T]he covert ops have been synchronized with the military road map, including the various US war scenarios envisaged since the launching of Theater Iran Near Term" (TIRANNT) in May 2003, barely a month after the invasion of Iraq."

Citing a report by the usually reliable Bill Arkin over at the Washington Post (from April 16th of last year, you should read the original article here), we learn that "Under TIRANNT, Army and U.S. Central Command planners have been examining both near-term and out-year scenarios for war with Iran, including all aspects of a major combat operation, from mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change."

The article goes on to cite reporting from ABC News that confirms the fact that the US is funding and in contact with Pakistani-based opposition groups inside Iran. Naturally, these opposition groups make use of terrorist tactics in order to undermine the Iranian regime - or, put another way, the US is covertly funding terrorism.

Chossudovsky explains that "Inherent in CIA covert operations, the Agency never grants funding 'directly'. It invariably proceeds through one of its proxy organizations including Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which historically, since the Soviet-Afghan war, has provided support to Islamic terror groups, including the funding of the training camps and the madrassahs, always acting on behalf of the CIA."

All of this is really just further evidence that the US currently remains on a "war footing" with these three countries, especially Iran. Whatever the public debate on the nation's airwaves or in the hallowed halls of Congress, diplomacy seems to have been completely abandoned by the Bushies in favor of the CIA trying to bring down Iran's economy and funding terrorist activities against the state.

But what is really most compelling about this article is the detailed (but somewhat thinly-sourced) historical context that the author provided:

The covert op applied in Iran are part of a consistent pattern. The not so hidden agenda of US intelligence, applied throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, is to trigger political instability and foment ethnic strife by supporting "Islamic terrorist organizations", ultimately with a view to weakening the Nation State and destabilizing sovereign countries.

From the onslaught of the Soviet-Afghan war and throughout the 1990s, a central feature of CIA activities has consisted in providing covert support to " Islamic terrorist organizations":

In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, "some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad."

These covert operations in support of the "Islamic Brigades" continued in the post-Cold war period. The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Soviet-Afghan war. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia." (Ibid). "Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia established themselves in the Muslim republics of the Former Soviet Union as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State." (Ibid)

A similar pattern emerged in the Balkans. Starting in the early 1990s, the Clinton Administration supported the recruitment of Al Qaeda Mujahideen to fight in Bosnia alongside the Bosnian Muslim Army. Ironically, it was the Republican Party in a document published by the Republican Party Committee of the US Senate which accused Clinton not only of a "''hands-on' involvement with the Islamic network's arms pipeline" but also of collaborating with the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), "a Sudan-based, phony humanitarian organization believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden,... " (citations removed, but can be viewed in the original article)

Finally, Chossudovsky cites a CNN with journalistic hero Seymour Hersh (whom I find extremely reliable) and discusses what the latter describes as "US Sponsored "Islamic Terrorists" [operating] inside Lebanon" which are also being covertly funded by the US via Saudi Arabia. In other words, "The pattern of Saudi support to Fatah Al Islam is part of a US sponsored covert operation similar to those conducted by the CIA in the 1980s in support of Al Qaeda."

This is all obviously quite complicated and confusing, but if you're like me and curious about what the hell the US is up to in the Middle East, this is an article you should take the time to read.

*As I note every time I link to an article from CRG, this is an organization that is virulently anti-Zionist - something I find extremely troubling. Additionally, Chossudovsky hs argued numerous times on his site that the 9/11 atacks were "an inside job", and while I agree the official version has inconsistencies, I don't buy into his wholesale consipracy theory. As with all partisan think tanks, it is extremely important to consider the research abd sourcing used to generate its conclusions. In this case, I think the Boston Globe, Washington Post, CNN and ABC News are fairly reliable and well-established mainstream media sources, but you should always draw your own conclusions.

BusinessWeek: The real cost of offshoring

BusinessWeek deserves a lot of credit for this week's cover story, an article written by Michael Mandel that takes an honest, no-holds-barred analysis of the impact corporate offshoring is having on the US economy. Mandel finds that the impact is real and deleterious - a conclusion that many of the newsmagazine's C-level executive subscribers/readers won't be happy to hear.

It is a generalization - but a pretty accurate one - that the business press covers economic policy issues more honestly and with more intellectual rigor than your typical political magazine mainly because business execs who rely on financial journalists' reporting use this information to make decisions, and business magazines therefore have less margin for error than, say, Newsweek or Time magazine. And BusinessWeek is one of the very best mainstream, mass-market business magazines in the country - far, far better than Forbes, Fortune or Barrons.

The article begins by explaining that:

Whenever critics of globalization complain about the loss of American jobs to low-cost countries such as China and India, supporters point to the powerful performance of the U.S. economy. And with good reason. Despite the latest slow quarter, official statistics show that America's economic output has grown at a solid 3.3% annual rate since 2003, a period when imports from low-cost countries have soared. Similarly, domestic manufacturing output has expanded at a decent pace. On the face of it, offshoring doesn't seem to be having much of an effect at all.

But new evidence suggests that shifting production overseas has inflicted worse damage on the U.S. economy than the numbers show. BusinessWeek has learned of a gaping flaw in the way statistics treat offshoring, with serious economic and political implications. Top government statisticians now acknowledge that the problem exists, and say it could prove to be significant.

Pseudo-economists and pundits like Larry Kudlow and others have made a good living off of dishonestly using government statistics to mislead readers who don't understand what the numbers mean without context - and this is his and many other pundits' strategy for selling economic policy arguments that are flat-out wrong.

But what we appear to have in this case is a systemic misunderstanding of what government data is telling us about the impact a policy (offshoring) is having on the broader economy.

And according to Mandel:

The underlying problem is located in an obscure statistic: the import price data published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Because of it, many of the cost cuts and product innovations being made overseas by global companies and foreign suppliers aren't being counted properly. And that spells trouble because, surprisingly, the government uses the erroneous import price data directly and indirectly as part of its calculation for many other major economic statistics, including productivity, the output of the manufacturing sector, and real gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to be the inflation-adjusted value of all the goods and services produced inside the U.S.

The result? BusinessWeek's analysis of the import price data reveals offshoring to low-cost countries is in fact creating "phantom GDP"--reported gains in GDP that don't correspond to any actual domestic production. The only question is the magnitude of the disconnect. "There's something real here, but we don't know how much," says J. Steven Landefeld, director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which puts together the GDP figures. Adds Matthew J. Slaughter, an economist at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College who until last February was on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers: "There are potentially big implications. I worry about how pervasive this is."

By BusinessWeek's admittedly rough estimate, offshoring may have created about $66 billion in phantom GDP gains since 2003. That would lower real GDP today by about half of 1%, which is substantial but not huge. But put another way, $66 billion would wipe out as much as 40% of the gains in manufacturing output over the same period.

Mandel goes on to explain how and why this problem is actually getting worse, but I think the important point of the article is not the dollar amount GDP is inflated but instead the fact that the government data is being grossly misread in the first place. And the big question there is whether supporters of offshoring policies (as a means for boosting corporate profits by lowering labor costs) are misinterpreting the statistics on purpose or not.

Again, Mandel and his editors at BusinessWeek deserve a lot of praise for going beyond merely reporting on government statistics and actually questioning their significance. This requires a healthy does of skepticism, which is the necessary pre-disposition any good journalist must have in approaching a story. The article exposes an overlooked dark side of globalization: Not only are jobs lost and wages depressed, but the entire US economy is suffering as a result. Much of the growth corporations claim they are experiencing as a result of offshoring their jobs and operations to Third World countries is in fact a "mirage" and these findings also have serious implicatons for this country's "free" trade policies as well.

Also, check out the Economic Policy Institute's Offshoring Issue Guide for more background.

US-China relations during the Cold War

China has become rather like Israel: No matter the party, no matter the leader, certain de rigueur formulas must be uttered . . . Every single American president since Nixon has, in one way or another, either ignored or quietly given up on the issue of Chinese democracy. Since this abandonment has been hemmed around by strenuous presidential representations that democracy is precisely what American policy toward China is all about, this has required some fancy ideological footwork.
Rick Perlstein, "Chinese Mirrors"

Historian Rick Perlstein wrote an utterly fascinating article for The Nation this week that you absolutely must read if you think you understand the motivations behind the US's foreign relations with China during the Cold War. I promise this article will add a fresh perspective, and perhaps get you to question your old preconceptions about the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon administrations. Not surprisingly, Kissinger comes out looking like a manipulative, Macchiavelian dickwad.

Perlstein's basic premise is that US stagecraft with China was based on putting the USSR off balance as well as the "Wal-Martization" of a huge country with plenty of natural resources and slave labor. He points out the nauseating hypocrisy behind US presidents like Nixon making nice with tyrranical dictators like Mao for the most self-serving and transparent of purposes. In less than four years, China went from a evil nation full of unthinking and unfeeling automatons to a country we could "do business with.

This change in position was necessary because "China had to be isolated to hold together an emerging 'multilateral global capitalist system in Asia.' " In Europe, the crucial geostrategic toehold was West Germany--which could enjoy economic health trading with the free states with which it was contiguous, free from the temptation to make peace with Moscow. Japan could not serve the same role in China: Its prosperity was traditionally built on trade with China. The temptation to form a modus vivendi with Mao was natural. So China had to be quarantined as an international pariah to render that temptation moot. What's more, the China that provided a role model to nations that wished to make a go of it outside the American-run international order of "free trade" threatened that entire order."

According to Perlstein's account, Nixon saw his famous 1972 trip to China as almost exclusively "an intervention in the balance of forces between the Soviet Union and China, an attempt to exploit tensions between the two superpowers to settle the Vietnam War." He elaborates that "the meaning turned out to be Wal-Martism. China does more business with the Arkansas retailer than it does with Canada, Russia or Australia. It evolved, too, into [a fantasy] that engagement would lead to democracy--a matter of indifference to Nixon and Kissinger.

The Carter administration doesn't exactly get a free pass either . . . he notes that "the apostle of human rights, President Carter, made the second breakthrough, after Nixon's: He came up with the rationalization that whatever the abuses evident in the 1970s, the situation was much better than it had been during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s."

The American mandarins and their stenographers in the mainstream media are too busy defending dictatorships to report on the gross violations has racked up in human rights violations in recent decades. He observes the sad truth that:

China knows it can count on them to swat down critics via a standard lexicon of abuse: They are "China bashers" possessed of a "cold war mentality." The China watchers are also absurdly deferential: "If we reflexively treat the Chinese as a threat, we will answer our own question: They will become a threat," says Newsweek contributing editor Robert Samuelson. "If you treat China as an enemy," says Harvard China hand Joseph Nye, "it will become an enemy."

Economists, those not busy lionizing America's favorite new source of dirt-cheap labor, might recognize this as a perverse set of incentives that hastens undesirable outcomes. "Pick a dictator anywhere on the globe," Mann writes [referring to James Mann's recently published book The China Fantasy], and you'll find Chinese backing. The Chinese gave Robert Mugabe an honorary degree--and "new surveillance equipment to crack down on Internet traffic and block dissident radio signals." The military regime in Burma has enjoyed consistent backing, as have Uzbek President Islam Karimov (the "body boiler"), the genocidal government of Sudan, even the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

Don't raise a fuss: "Any tension between America and China is inherently bad," Mann paraphrases the China watchers, "and is the responsibility of the United States. However, if the confrontation involves intellectual property rights or other U.S. commercial interests, then it is China's fault and is a legitimate issue that must be addressed immediately."

Finally, Perlstein does what all good historians do - he goes to the official NSC documents that have since been declassified and does some real investigatory work. He shows how absolutely creepy it is that not only do our policy elites obsess over using propaganda to convince the American public that its foreign policy is benevolent - they are convinced by their own propaganda as well.

These two books also provide more historical context on US-East Asian foreign policy during the Cold War, considering trade and economic concerns as well as the more frequently discussed geopolitical ones.

It's also worth taking a look at China's current human rights record here and here.

Can tech entrepreneurs really help end poverty in Africa?

Here's yet another worthless article published in the New York Times purporting to discuss economic development policy in Africa without - you know - actually discussing economic development policy at all.

The author's argument can be briefly summed up as "By creating hi-tech startups, even the poorest countries in Africa can create wealth". The critical role neoliberal US trade policy, corporate globalization, propping up thuggish dictators and the disastrous World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank play in sustaining poverty in the Global South aren't even mentioned in passing. Neither is the considerable history of Africa's colonization, conquest, theft of natural resources, slavery and political manipulation by the so-called "Developed World".

This piece of drek "reporting" signals to me that the author, who happens to be the editor of MIT's Technology Review, is nothing more than a little Tom Friedman wanna-be who would have his readers believe that there is no discernable role multi-laterals, wealthy governments and NGOs can play in terms of economic development. So it's simply up to Africans to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and enrich their fellow countrymen by creating cool new dot-coms.

In other words, let's give the organizations that are supposed to be helping to address these issues but are instead are making the situation worse a free pass and instead advance a convenient (but fictitious) narrative that entrepreneurial Africans can solve their problems on their own. Nice job, New York Times, give the technocrats an unchallenged soapbox with which to claim technology and entrepreneurship can miraculously solve poverty in Africa while ignoring the disastrous neoliberal trade, aid and development policy coming from the world's wealthiest nations.

Update (7/16): Upon further reflection, perhaps I have been rather too cynical about the role tech entrepreneurs, scientists and other well-meaning types can play in alleviating poverty in the Developing World. Articles like this one from Newsweek are really amazing enough to make even the most committed cynic adopt his views. Ashok Gadgil, Troubled Times salutes you!

Edwards' health care plan

Presidential hopeful John Edwards' recently unveiled health care plan is, from my initial reading, the best proposal put forward so far by a viable candidate. He wants to reduce health care costs - which all serious observers agree are way out of control - mainly by removing patents for some "breakthrough" drugs as well as requiring health insurance companies to spend at least 85 percent of their premiums on patient care. Both of these proposals seem quite reasonable, and it will be fun watching the other candidates that have been unceremoniously bought-and-paid-for by the Pharma lobby twist themselves into gordion knots and arguing that this is "anti-business" or "un-American".

And I'm sure all the "free" trade cheerleaders from both political parties who again have had their campaigns financed by Wall Street investment banks and multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers will have no problem giving the green light to much needed patent reform for lifesaving drugs - after all, what could be more "protectionist" than having the federal government subsidizing and then protecting from competition the likes of super-profitable firms like Pfizer and Merck?

According to the AP, which covered the former Senator's announcement in Detroit, "Edwards' plan would remove long-term patents for companies that develop breakthrough drugs and then reap large profits because of the monopolies those patents provide."

Crucially, Edwards is arguing - again I think quite correctly - that offering cash incentives instead would allow multiple companies to produce those drugs and drive down prices.

For a comprehensive analysis of why the US needs to reform drug patent law, see this excellent blog post here.)

He is also dead-right in proposal that drug makers must spend at least 85 percent of the premiums they collect on patient care. The AP quotes him as saying:

"Three out of 10 health care dollars go to administrative costs. How much of this is spent on insurers giving families the run-around and figuring out how to deny claims?"

Of course, when you hear someone criticizing excessive "administrative costs" or "overhead", what he or she is really referring to is exorbitant executive compensation, or outrageous advertising and marketing budgets to boost sales. Keep in mind that the Pharma manufacturers' research and development (R&D) costs are heavily subsidized by the government.

For added granularity, see this fact sheet over at Edwards' official blog as well as health care pundit and blogger Ezra Klein's post here (and also here and here).