Blinded: the Burning Bush

Here's the Bushwhacked administration in miniature: it's a very hot summer in most of the U.S., including Virginia near Washington, D.C. It's in the mid 80s in the morning and the high 90s in the afternoon, with constant high humidity. But it's summer, so the Boy Scouts go camping. They have a huge Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill in Bowling Green, Virginia., an hour south of the White House.

You'd expect Boy Scouts to raise their own tents, supervised by scoutmasters. But the modern Boy Scouts, like the modern Army, apparently also relies these days on outside contractors. On Monday, with the help of their professional mercenaries, several scout leaders tried to erect tents under power lines. Apparently they hadn't read the scout warning against doing that. Four were electrocuted. Two had sons attending the jamboree.

A memorial service was scheduled for Wednesday, and for some unexplained reason, President Bush decided to attend. Perhaps he was in dire need of a merit badge, or he just wanted an excuse to wear another uniform he hadn't earned.

So instead of quietly---and quickly---honoring the fallen leaders and comforting their fellow scouts, thousands of Boy Scouts from all over the country stood in the ferocious heat waiting for the President.

Perhaps the President didn't believe in the heat. After all, he doesn't believe in global heating, so he was probably waiting for further research on the heat an hour away from his air-conditioned office. Or maybe one of his aides deftly changed "upper 90s" to "lower 70s."

So the boys waited, and waited, and drank lots of water, and waited. And then they started dropping. Like flies. Or like Boy Scouts somebody should have told to get out of the heat.

The Associated Press estimates that 300 got sick. Some were taken away in stretchers. Some were actually airlifted to hospitals.

Then the Jamboree was hit with a violent thunderstorm and high winds. The helicopters couldn't airlift any more Scouts, and the base hospital apparently couldn't handle any more, so ambulances drove them to hospitals through the driving rain.

As for the President, he may not believe in global heating but he apparently believes in thunderstorms. His visit was cancelled because of the storm and wind.

This was on a day that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in a heavily fortified U.S. base in Iraq, urging the Iraqis to get with the program, perhaps even write a constitution that (contrary to the draft published in their newspapers) doesn't create an Islamic state, limit women's rights more than Saddam did, and---worst of all---splits up the oil rights.

Through leaks and innuendo, the Bushwhackers seem to be trying to quell restive calls both there and here for an end to the occupation by suggesting the U.S. is engaging in a slow and unspoken withdrawal. Bob Herbert in the New York Times is having none of that.

"The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget," he writes.

American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.

There is no real withdrawal plan," he concludes. "The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely."

Let them stand out in the sun, because G.W. doesn't believe the Iraq war is a debacle and a quagmire. It, like the whole climate crisis thing, is all about the oil, and oil blinds. Besides, he is safe in his air-conditioned office, and his helicopter will not fly where the bullets do.

Here's to You, Ontario. Costco, you're the One.

On a day when the fractures within American labor became open rebellion, apparently caused by still declining union membership and influence, it’s useful to note two other news stories that illustrate the validity of some old verities, sadly lost in the age of Reagan-Bush.

Paul Krugman’s New York Times column zeroes in on the new North American Toyota plant. A number of U.S. locales competed for it, with the “incentives” that have become standard since the 1980s, and which form one foundation of the success of companies like Wal-Mart: the tax breaks, free roadways and other bribes that often cost localities more than they will ever get back. (Wal-Mart in particular has been known to take the money and, when they’re scheduled to begin paying back in actual taxes, run.)

But Toyota chose none of these places: the plant is being built in Ontario, Canada. The reasons, as Krugman writes, are highly instructive.

Canada’s workforce is better educated than the workforce in the competing states, mostly in the South, where taxes are low and so the standards of the school systems are lower still.

The other main reason is health care. Canadians workers are covered by national health, so that’s a major cost that industry doesn’t have to bear.

In both cases, public responsibility for a public good is seen as important to a healthy economy and the society as a whole. This is especially true because of the nature of these jobs, and the costs of failing to meet these responsibilities in a sane manner. Krugman writes:

… in the long run decisions like Toyota's probably won't affect the overall number of jobs in either the United States or Canada. But the result of international competition will be to give Canada more jobs in industries like autos, which pay health benefits to their U.S. workers, and fewer jobs in industries that don't provide those benefits. In the U.S. the effect will be just the reverse: fewer jobs with benefits, more jobs without.

So what's the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there's no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won't increase government spending.

But U.S. taxpayers will suffer, because the general public ends up picking up much of the cost of health care for workers who don't get insurance through their jobs. Some uninsured workers and their families end up on Medicaid. Others end up depending on emergency rooms, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

In other words, the cost of heeding the something-for-nothing rhetoric of low taxes that gets people elected, is that U.S. taxpayers don’t get the benefits of good schools, health care and good jobs, and wind up paying anyway.

That’s not today’s orthodoxy, of course. Neither is the way that one successful company looks at the value of its workers to its business.

In another recent New York Times story, “How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-mart,” a Wall Street analyst frowns on that company’s employee policies.

Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.

"He has been too benevolent," she said.

Paying people decently and treating them as human beings and fellow members of your society is indeed a novel concept in today’s culture and business environment. Witness Hewlett-Packard just the other day, pleasing Wall Street with its cost-cutting plans: laying off thousands of workers, and ENDING PENSIONS for all of them.

Of course, Costco has relatively happy employees, who stay with the company (so less cost for continual training of newbies), and their relationships with the company and with customers is therefore sincere.

Here’s what Costco is doing:

Besides paying considerably more than competitors, for example, Costco contributes generously to its workers' 401(k) plans, starting with 3 percent of salary the second year and rising to 9 percent after 25 years.

ITS insurance plans absorb most dental expenses, and part-time workers are eligible for health insurance after just six months on the job, compared with two years at Wal-Mart. Eighty-five percent of Costco's workers have health insurance, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart and Target.

Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.

Here’s another part of the story: Jim Sinegal, Costco’s founder and CEO, makes some $350,000 a year, which as he says means he is very well rewarded, and he’s worth a lot in stock and bonuses, but compared to other chief executives, his salary is scandalously low---why, it’s “less than 10 percent of many other chief executives, though Costco ranks 29th in revenue among all American companies,” the Times says.

"I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities,” Sinegal said. “Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."

Wrong? What an unlikely word to hear coming out of a CEO’s mouth in this day and age!

What’s it all about? I grew up in a time and in a place where unions were strong, and even as children we feared a steel strike almost as much as Communist atom bombs. It was still possible to hear our parents tell stories they’d heard from their parents about the hard days before unions and the sometimes harder days of organizing them. In high school I was shown a peaceful green valley which had once been filled with the shacks where miners lived, I was told. The valley was ringed with lights by the company, shining down on those shacks all night so no meetings could be held undetected.

At the height of labor’s power, American industry was the strongest in the world and the economy grew and grew. A few far-seeing if not exactly enlightened industrialists like Henry Ford had long before figured out that if they didn’t pay workers a decent wage, there wouldn’t be many customers for their cars and other products. But their benevolent self-interest went only so far, and the unions were there to stand up for workers’ rights, and give them a real voice.

The relationship of business and labor was established during FDR’s long presidency, and at the same time so was the role of government in the equation. Nobody really complained much about paying taxes for schools, when education was a key to every child’s future, or for social security, because everybody got old. And there was growing support for universal health care, because everybody got sick.

Business may not have been crazy about the minimum wage, but they were happy enough to take federal subsidies, and watch their new economy prosper thanks to federal and state highways, subsidized air and rail transport. They were also happy to have junior execs with college degrees made possible by the GI Bill and other federal and state higher education grants and loans.

But prosperity began to seem automatic, and even greater prosperity was televised with such conviction that it seemed anyone could get rich, and being rich was what it was all about. So along with selling the high consumption ideal, the new media machinery sold the notion of the entrepreneur as high stakes gambler hero, with mere plodding workers treated like serfs, like losers. Hope was no longer the schools or the labor union, but the lottery.

When the U.S. steel industry began its collapse in the 1970s, the unions---not perfect by any measure---somehow took the brunt. With all those jobs gone and everyone running scared, it became much easier in the 1980s for business to ignore unions and intimidate workers into not organizing. Unions and “gubment” became defined as the problem.

I remember an older man in Pennsylvania saying quietly, “You know why they killed the unions, don’t you? The bosses looked out at the employee parking lot and saw too many Cadilacs.” He said it like a joke, but he meant it, and years later, I realized that he was at least partly right. There can be no question that along with the buying power and “keeping score” with their competitors, a major benefit for the executives getting those typically huge salaries and bonuses these days, is the marked contrast to the relative pittance paid to their employees. There are apparently a lot of people out there who can’t think of themselves as winners unless there are many more people who lose.

Unfortunately for them and for us, an economy and a society based on the principles of personal selfishness and greed, liberated envy and cultivated unconsciousness as well as institutionalized ignorance, can’t last for long.

Here’s to you, Ontario. Costco, you’re the one.

George orWell Bush

Is the Bush administration interested in protecting Americans and helping to structure a peaceful world? Or is it bent on creating a police state, using lies and raw power to advance the interests of a few corporations, with no conscience as to the consequences for most of the world?

The evidence could not be clearer, from only this past week.

With little notice and less real debate, the Republican dominated House passed a permanent extension of the Patriot Act. Because of the fear of terrorism, its supporters were able to shift the burden of proof to those who opposed it. This is utterly backwards.

The Patriot Act, most of it never a reasonable idea, was passed as an emergency measure to combat terrorism in the U.S. It is an axiom of the American system that rights cannot be violated without compelling and demonstrable reason, if then. Supporters have failed to demonstrate how the Patriot Act has effectively prevented terrorist activities since it was passed. Therefore, on its face, its renewal, and its many intrusions and violations of basic rights, is unjustified. (Some of its provisions are outlined below.)

Also this week, reports surfaced of how the FBI is using its investigative powers to "fight terrorism." It gathered some 3,500 pages of documents on a few civil rights and antiwar protest groups, including 1,173 pages on the American Civil Liberties Union and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace.

Who in their right mind believes that the American Civil Liberties Union is recruiting suicide bombers? What genius in Washington is suspicious that Greenpeace is planning to bomb some urban subway system? We just passed the 20th anniversary of the sinking of the Greenpeace ship by French intelligence, because of that group's anti-nuclear protests. The idiocy and infamy of that act has apparently become obvious to everyone in the world except the Bush administration's FBI.

It would seem that a far more effective method of fighting terrorism would be to gather foreign intelligence on biological, chemical and nuclear terrorist threats, through covert networks like the one recently destroyed by high officials in the Bush administration when they revealed the name of the covert CIA agent in charge of it.

While the Bushwhackers want to spend taxpayer money gathering useless information on fellow citizens, violating privacy and attempting to intimidate political opponents engaged in constitutionally protected dissent, they are trying furiously to limit public access to information that graphically illustrates their own police state tactics and moral degeneracy at Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo. This is so important to them that Bush is threatening to veto the entire $442 billion defense bill if it contains provisions to regulate treatment of detainees or to investigate treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.

Also last week, the Bushheads went to court yet again to prevent the release of more photos and video showing abuses at Abu Ghirab prison in Iraq.

As the involvement of Karl Rove and Scotter Libby threatened to highlight the already demonstrable fact that the Bushers consciously lied to Congress, the American people and the world in order to justify an unprovoked and ruinous war---and with the Harris poll showing that 65% of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq---Bush rushed his appointment to the Supreme Court to distract the media. He chose a judge so tied to corporate interests and right wing Republicans that one blogger's (billmon) metaphorical description of him as a "made man" in the Bush crime family is more apt than amusing.

But the Bushmaulers are apparently unchastened by the horrendous state of Iraq they've created, and its new status as the world incubator for terrorists. A story repeated on many blogs but which originated in a conservative newspaper reports that vice president Dick Cheney ordered the Pentagon to draw up contingency plans for a bombing attack on Iran, including nuclear weapons.

Contingency plans in themselves are at least theoretically prudent, but we are talking about the likely inspirational leader of the attack on Iraq. The Strategic Air Command has identified some 450 targets in Iran. The story concludes:

“As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing -- that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack -- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”

The Police State Act

Here are some of the provisions from the Police State Act, otherwise known as the Patriot Act.
It has been passed by the U.S. House. A slightly different but no less destructive version will be debated early in the fall by the Senate.

from billmon:

This is probably a good time to remind people what Section 215 gives the government the power to do:

* Order any person or entity to turn over "any tangible things," so long as the FBI specifies that the order is part of an authorized terrorism or intelligence investigation.

* Obtain personal data, including medical records, without any specific facts connecting those records to a foreign terrorist.

* Prohibit doctors and insurance companies from disclosing to their patients that their medical records have been seized by the government.

* Obtain library and book store records, including lists of books checked out, without any specific facts connecting the records to a foreign agent or terrorist.

* Obtain private financial records without a court order, and without notification to the person involved.

* Conduct intelligence investigations of both United States citizens and permanent residents without probable cause, or even reasonable grounds to believe that they are engaged in criminal activity or are agents of a foreign power.

* Investigate U.S. citizens based in part on their exercise of their First Amendment rights, and non-citizens based solely on their exercise of those rights. (Naturally, decisions about what constitutes "in part" are left to a secret court, meeting secretly.)

* Those served with Section 215 orders are prohibited from disclosing that fact to anyone -- even their attorney. (This provision was struck down by a U.S. district court last year.)

Section 213 of PATRIOT, meanwhile, allows federal agents to:

* Conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches of your home.

* Enter your home or office and seize items for an indefinite period of time, without informing you that a warrant has been issued.

And Section 216 lets the feds:

* Seize records that could show the subject lines of your e-mails and the details pf your Web surfing habits.