Nation Topics - Analyst | The Nation

Reports that the United States President George W. Bush administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours' notice. Reference to an article by military analyst William Arkin in the "Washington Post" regarding the U.S. nuclear policy; Reference to the Nuclear Posture Review Report of 2002, which grew out of Bush's military strategy of pre-emptive war; Discussion of the government document titled "National Security Strategy of the United States of America"; Claim that the U.S. nuclear threat will push other nations into nuclear proliferation.

The author profiles conservative foreign policy analyst, Daniel Pipes. Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months, Pipes would appear on 110 television and 450 radio shows. The "Philadelphia Inquirer" described him as "smoking-hot." It was not always thus. Pipes, 54, had labored in comparative obscurity during the 1990s, writing a series of books and articles that advanced a hard line on Arab countries from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Iran, and darkly warning that Muslim-Americans posed a threat to the United States. But Pipes's biggest impact has not come from analyzing foreign affairs. It has come from pointing a finger at a purported fifth column lurking in a place conservatives have long suspected of harboring one: academia. Two years ago Pipes launched Campus Watch, an organization whose stated purpose is to expose the analytical failures and political bias of the field of Middle Eastern studies. In Pipes's view, universities these days are overrun by extremists who are reflexively hostile to the United States and Israel, blind to the dangers of Islamic terrorism and intolerant of students who dare to veer from the party line. This might seem like an odd time to be policing the academy in search of scholars too critical of Washington's approach to the Middle East, given the chaos now enveloping Iraq, which numerous academic scholars foresaw.

The author comments on the Bush Administration's reaction to the statement by weapons inspector David Kay that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 war. As an MSNBC analyst before the war, former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay often seemed more like a cheerleader for the Bush Administration's Iraq policy than he did an impartial expert on Iraq's weapons programs. Now, seven months later, Kay has resigned, concluding that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program and possessed no biological or chemical weapons. The justification used by Kay and other weapons experts who supported the US case a year ago is that even the UN inspectors believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But in fact, chief inspector Hans Blix went out of his way before the war to say that the UN inspectors did not know whether Iraq still had proscribed weapons. When such tactics failed to quell rising questions, the White House moved to refine its dissembling strategy, promising to look into what went wrong with the intelligence-gathering process but only after the Iraq Survey Group has completed its work at some unspecified time in the future, most likely after the November election, in pursuing such delaying tactics, the Administration seems to be more interested in coveting up its lies and deceptions than it is in American national security.

The tidal wave of red ink flowing from telecommunication companies worldwide has engulfed workers and consumers no less than managers, investors and Wall Street players. After a frenzied period of deregulation in the United States and privatization abroad--followed by destructive competition, high-cost borrowing and over-building of telecommunication capacity--scores of firms have collapsed, vaporizing at least $1 trillion in shareholder value in the United States alone. Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman, who abetted the U.S. telecommunications boom and bust in underhanded ways, and others have been forced to pay millions in civil penalties. Meanwhile, telecommunications labor is left holding the bag--with many nonunion employees losing both their jobs and retirement savings because the latter consisted mostly of company stock that is now nearly worthless. Newspaper advertisements run by Verizon criticized the union, the Communications Workers of America, for creating unrealistic expectations about job security. Of course, chief executive officer Ivan Seidenberg and other telecommunication bosses expect guaranteed rewards for themselves. Telecommunication unionists are beginning to organize around the issues of corporate accountability and executive pay, public regulation and service quality, and the need for universal service at affordable prices. Union Network International is helping to coordinate this campaign.

The financial scandals continue to produce more outrageous revelations, but lately they come with lurid personal details more appropriate to bottom-dwelling tabloids than the 'Wall Street Journal.' Citigroup's well-known stock analyst, Jack Grubman, manipulates witless investors into buying the shares of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), not to accumulate more worldly wealth for himself or his firm but to get his 3-year-old twins into the prestigious preschool at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. In return, Grubman pumps up his valuation of AT&T stock to a "strong buy" so that Citigroup chief executive Sandy Weill may ingratiate himself with an AT&T executive who is also a Citigroup director who is recruited for a boardroom plot to destroy Weill's rival for power at the bank. Grubman's boastful communications with friends and colleagues have been disclosed, thanks to a relentless public sleuth named Eliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General. What do we learn from this instructive tale? That it's not always only about the money. It's also about roaring egotism, the kind of imperial self-gratification the members of a privileged club operating on vast unaccountable power expect. It seems increasingly likely that reform efforts are over, at least in official circles. The enormous rot in the Wall Street system has been revealed--the personal thievery and institutional disloyalty to customers--but the reform fever peaked last summer when Congress passed modest, first-step legislation, the Sarbanes bill, that set up a new accounting oversight board. If corporate reform does occur, it must originate elsewhere, from the vigilant Spitzer and other state AGs, from private lawyers suing on behalf of injured investors, perhaps from the rising anger of ordinary citizens who, thanks to the Grubman we finally get the story

Sanford I. Weill, chairman of Citigroup, admitted helping the twin children of a former stock analyst, Jack B. Grubman, get into the preschool at the 92nd Street Y in 2000. Citigroup also made a $1 million grant to the Y that year.

The election results in the United States reveal what may be an emerging majority. No one can deny the partisan divide in the country. As analyst Mike Lux points out, even the state legislatures are closely contested. In forty-six, a pick-up of five seats or less would change party control. An election night survey by Gore pollster Stan Greenberg for the Campaign for America `s Future showed that 40 percent of voters never considered voting for U.S. President George W. Bush, while 39 percent never considered voting for Al Gore. Fundamental questions facing the country, globalization, global warming, the yawning divide between rich and poor, the lack of affordable healthcare, the failed drug war were off the table during the campaign, raised, if at all, only by Ralph Nader.

According to "The Myth of Widespread American Poverty," a recent "backgrounder" by Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Robert Rector, the U.S. Census Bureau is promulgating a false picture when it classifies some 13 percent of Americans as poor. In a 1989 Gallup poll commissioned by the U.S. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Population Reference Bureau, Americans placed the poverty line 24 percent higher than the Census Bureau. Still, by making homeless vagrants and coatless children the standard of measurement, Rector is able to suggest that the large majority of poor Americans are in pretty good shape: 41 percent own their homes, 70 percent own a car, far from being undernourished, poor people are likely to be obese.

The article discusses the book "The New Politics of Poverty," by Lawrence M. Mead. This is not just another antigovernment treatise on poverty and welfare. Mead, a conservative policy analyst who teaches politics at New York University, wants more government intervention in citizens' lives. Specifically, he calls for a "new paternalism" to impose behavioral standards on the poor, who, in his view, have become dysfunctional and unable, if not unwilling, to cope. The call for a new paternalism is neither random, accidental nor harmless. Rather, it is a highly political response to the adverse consequences of decisions made by business and the state as they tried to manage the economic crisis that surfaced in the mid-1970s.

A political analyst wrote at the time of the New Hampshire primary that the two irrelevant candidates for President this year, Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan, should leave the field to heavyweights like George Bush. The word radical derives from the Latin word for root. Meanwhile, the word isolationist has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our Republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond capacity to pay for it.