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Donations for Terrorists?
By Matt Bivens
Imagine if some bugaboo of the right -- Hilary Clinton, say -- gave the keynote address at a charity event linked to terrorists.
Imagine if three whole days before Senator Clinton lent her name and her time to the event, The Hill, a quality newspaper that covers Congress, had come out with a devastating report linking the charity event to a terrorist organization -- one that has killed Americans, seized a US Embassy, and worked hand-in-glove with Saddam. Imagine if The Hill report, under the headline "Terrorists Plan DC Fundraiser," also revealed that the Red Cross -- the purported beneficiary of the event -- was having nothing to do with it.
Imagine if two whole days beforehand, one Republican Congressman had demanded that Attorney General John Ashcroft investigate the charity, and another who'd been invited to speak announced he wouldn't.
(0) CommentsJanuary 30, 2004
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January's 375,000
By Matt Bivens
When the job market is weak, the US government historically has switched on temporary, emergency aid payments to the unemployed. Doing so is smart, economically stimulative policy; it doesn't cost too much in the grand scheme of things; and we prepare for the eventuality by setting aside rainy-day money -- at last count, about $20 billion.
But these days the "compassionate conservatives" are running the government. And they're sitting on their hands. Last month they allowed emergency unemployment help to expire, and they're now watching passively as thousands of families every day slip between the cracks -- without a paycheck, and now without any government help either.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, citing Labor Department data, estimates that 375,000 unemployed workers will exhaust all their benefits by the end of January. CBPP says that's the largest number of abandoned unemployed since records started being kept in 1973. "Based on the latest data," CBPP adds, "nearly two million unemployed workers are expected to be in this situation during the first six months of 2004." And that's a prediction that assumes modest improvements in the labor market.
(0) CommentsJanuary 29, 2004
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Sucking Wind
By Matt Bivens
"I'm going to resist with all that I can muster the disassembling of this [energy] bill in a manner that does not assure us of getting most of the bill passed."
So says Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico. And with good reason: The 1,200-page mystery concoction known as the Energy Bill is at heart an indefensible project. Consider just that it would gift-wrap at last count about $37 billion -- billions! -- for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries.
No one wants to stand there, red-faced, and try to explain why they want to borrow against the credit of the American people -- just so they can give away billions of dollars on the sly to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear polluters. Therefore, the core budget-looting project has been hidden behind a few far more modest, far more popular proposals -- like upgrading the electric grid system, investing in energy efficiency, and extending a tiny, routine tax credit for wind power.
(0) CommentsJanuary 28, 2004
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'The Deserter'
By Matt Bivens
When muckraking filmmaker Michael Moore recently called President George W. Bush a "deserter," journalists and pundits recoiled in distaste. Peter Jennings, to take one example of many, said Moore had leveled "a reckless charge not supported by the facts."
Moore has countered by assembling much of the public record about George W. Bush's absence without leave (AWOL) from the National Guard. It includes mutually reinforcing reports by The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News and other mainstream media, citing everyone from combat veterans in the Senate to the National Guard's own documents.
The bottom line: At a time when the nation was at war in Vietnam, Bush was AWOL for at least several months from his States-side military post.
(0) CommentsJanuary 27, 2004
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The Myth of a Master List
By Matt Bivens
A 5-year-old child, a Chinese grandmother, a Welsh insurance agent, a prominent scientist and two average Joes. Six cases of mistaken identity -- six grounded flights between Paris and Los Angeles.
Most of us are in favor of erring on the side of caution when it comes to keeping airlines from being hijacked. So there was little complaint raised about the Bush Administration grounding flights seemingly at random during the Christmas holidays.
But most of us are also in favor of competence. And it's starting to seem in ever-shorter supply.
(0) CommentsJanuary 26, 2004
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Arm the Insane
By Matt Bivens
James Brady had been the White House press secretary barely two months when he and his President were attacked outside the Washington Hilton hotel. Wielding a handgun, would-be assassin John Hinckley got off six bullets in three seconds. Ronald Reagan was shot under his left arm, Brady in the head; a police officer and a Secret Service agent were also wounded.
Despite a crippling head injury, Brady served as White House press secretary until the end of the Reagan Administration. Afterwards, he and his wife Sarah took up the cause of sensible handgun control.
Now, the Bushies are never shy about trading on the Reagan popularity. But if they truly respected the Reagan and Brady families, you'd have thought they'd have leapt to support the Bradys' crusade to get guns off our streets.
(0) CommentsJanuary 23, 2004
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The Military Penalty
By Matt Bivens
"... when you and your friends see a man or woman in uniform, say, 'thank you'. (Applause.)" -- George W. Bush in his State of the Union.
Both houses of Congress have opposed President Bush's assault on overtime pay, but the President and his business-suite allies have insisted. Now our anti-weekend leaders have gotten their way: A messy budget bill approved today included a provision allowing them to rewrite our overtime rules.
Bush's plan has been discussed exhaustively, including in some 80,000 letters indignant members of the public have sent his Labor Department. (The best of these are from business associations praising the plan; those letters make it all so clear how arbitrary and anti-employee this is.) The plan is demonstrably about lower pay and longer hours for millions of working Americans -- in the name of slightly higher short-term profits for a few pioneer bosses. This is an Administration that thinks inherited wealth is morally superior to hard work -- fitting, since it's headed up by the poster child for inherited wealth and laziness.
(0) CommentsJanuary 22, 2004
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Twenty Jobs
By Matt Bivens
"Jobs are on the rise." -- George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech.
He's right. For five months now, jobs have been growing -- but slowly, and weakly. This is far from what the President promised us back in April 2003, when White House press releases were declaring: "The President has proposed $726 billion in tax relief to create ... a total of 1.4 million new jobs by the end of [2004]."
Gee, that works out to $518,000 per job. (At least it does as the White House has so clutzily posed the question here.) Had that materialized as advertised, it would have been one of the more expensive job-creation programs in economic history; you'd have to look to Stalin-era dreams of reversing the flow of Siberia's rivers to find such a staggeringly wasteful triumph.
(0) CommentsJanuary 21, 2004
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Censor Bowl Sunday
By Matt Bivens
About this time last year, the outrage of the day was Soviet-style censorship of our American airwaves.
Comcast cable had refused to accept a few very tame advertisements questioning the wisdom of launching a land-war-of-choice in the Middle East -- advertisements originally slated to run before and after George W. Bush's lie-packed 2003 State of the Union speech. And it wasn't just Comcast: CNN, NBC and Fox all apparently made it a policy to refuse to accept ads questioning the war. (I particularly relished the CNN spokeswoman's explanation, as reported by The Washington Post, that "we do not accept international advocacy ads on regions in conflict." Perhaps she meant regions about to be in conflict, after we attack them?)
So the President had his say, his opponents were gagged, no one really had boo to say about it -- and here we are today, 500 line-of-duty deaths and counting, and nothing to show for it except a post-Saddam Pandora's Box of ethnic hatreds and the gas bill from Halliburton. The ads' sponsors, of course, filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission; no doubt FCC chairman Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, has been pursuing it aggressively ever since.
(0) CommentsJanuary 20, 2004
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Dr. Red Tape
By Matt Bivens
Talented, dedicated professionals armed with high-tech equipment take care of our health. But acres of forests and of time -- and about $400 billion, or nearly one-third of all the money spent on health care -- is just for the paperwork.
Four hundred billion dollars for the red tape!
It's a staggering sum -- a Pentagon-sized sum. And according to the comprehensive study by researchers from the Harvard Medical School and from Public Citizen that produced this estimate, some $286 billion of that is utter waste -- spending which could be jettisoned overboard by switching to a Canadian-style system. In Canada -- where they spend half as much on health care yet have universal coverage and live two years longer than Americans -- doctors use a single simple form to bill one insurance plan, and hospitals negotiate an annual budget with a single agency. (Compare that to US doctors and hospitals, who must hire enormous staffs to deal with hundreds of Byzantine forms from hundreds of insurance plans).
(0) CommentsJanuary 16, 2004
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