What are we teaching?
The Bushies didn’t invent corruption — they just provided the sweet little hot-house it needed to flourish in this nation … it had already gotten a big foot-hold in the “Greed Is Good” era that gave us Enron. And it isn’t just a purge in Washington that’s needed — it’s everywhere we look, all around the world.
The Cosmo’s conspired to unleash the worst of human consciousness at the same time, world wide. We have “conservative values” fanning out into Mexico, Canada, Australia and now in France … see what fear can do? But, so far, fear has given the world nothing but opportunity for a firmer government fist and a higher profit margin for those who cozy with them.
I hear that [Virginia Tech's mass-murderer] Cho’s mother was desperate to have him “exorcised of demonic power” and had already selected the church to help her. I doubt it would have helped the young man cope with his unique combination of paranoid self-pity, self-loathing and isolation — but it’s no surprise to me that we’re seeing more and more of these kinds of youngsters.
We’ll have a lot more Cho’s if we don’t wake up and smell the corruption and ethical morass — kids hear the headlines too. While the adults [sic] of the world have a meltdown because the “good world” they used to live in has come apart at the seams, kids look around and see their parents and leaders either compromising with corruption, standing in the middle awash with angst and overwhelm, or joining the team.
And that’s the message our children will take into the future unless we stand up to what is So Damned Wrong and show them what ethics actually means. They’re watching us for hints in how to cope — if we don’t have any, we’d better get ‘em FAST because we’re teaching the next generation how to be doormats and victims! They’re watching every choice we make, and every step we take.
Here’s just a sampling of the corruption that we read about on a daily basis. The collection below shows us why we’ve got to get busy setting the model for responsible citizenship … or just cash it in. Some of this is update on Eight Gate, some on Condi’s culpability, featuring an editorial by Frank Rich — then UNESCO, the Vets, and even little backwater towns where ethical darkness goes unnoticed.
I’ll just throw in a little ACIM to this mix … it’s timely to this conversation and speaks to where ethics are born in us.
Teach only Love, for that is what you are!
Jude
Congress considers broadening Justice Department inquiry
Greg Gordon and Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers
Sun, May. 06, 2007
WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators are beginning to focus on accusations that a top civil rights official at the Justice Department illegally hired lawyers based on their political affiliations, especially for sensitive voting rights jobs.
Two former department lawyers told McClatchy Newspapers that Bradley Schlozman, a senior civil rights official, told them in early 2005, after spotting mention of their Republican affiliations on their job applications, to delete those references and resubmit their resumes. Both attorneys were hired.
One of them, Ty Clevenger, said: “He wanted to make it look like it was apolitical.”
Schlozman did not respond to phone calls to his home Sunday. But he denied the allegations in an earlier phone interview with McClatchy Newspapers and through a department spokesman. In the interview he said he “tried to de-politicize the hiring process” and filled jobs with applicants from “across the political spectrum.”
Attention is turning to Schlozman after the announcement last week that the Justice Department opened an internal investigation to determine whether Monica Goodling, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ White House liaison, illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring entry-level prosecutors. The department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility are conducting that inquiry jointly.
Federal law and Justice Department policies bar the consideration of political affiliation in hiring of personnel for non-political, career jobs.
A congressional aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees want to look beyond Goodling to see whether other department officials may have skewed recruiting and hiring to favor Republican applicants. Investigators have heard allegations that Schlozman showed a political bias in hiring and hope the department will permit him to be interviewed voluntarily, the aide said.
Sen. Claire McCaskell, D-Mo., told National Public Radio last week that she wants to hear testimony from Schlozman because “more answers under oath need to be given.”
One of the former Justice Department employees, Clevenger, is pursuing a whistleblower suit alleging he was wrongly fired for exposing mistreatment of employees by his Special Litigation Section chief.
Clevenger and the other lawyer recounted Schlozman’s odd handling of their job applications in the spring of 2005. Clevenger said his resume stated that he was a member of the conservative Federalist Society and the Texas chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The other applicant’s resume cited work on President Bush’s 2000 campaign, said the attorney, who insisted upon anonymity for fear of retaliation.
They said Schlozman directed them to drop the political references and resubmit the resumes in what they believed were an effort to hide those conservative affiliations.
Clevenger also recalled once passing on to Schlozman the name of a friend from Stanford as a possible hire.
“Schlozman called me up and asked me something to the effect of, `Is he one of us?’” Clevenger said. “He wanted to know what the guy’s partisan credentials were.”
Schlozman, who recently completed more than a year’s service as interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City that was marked with controversy, has drawn harsh criticism over his conduct as the top deputy in the Civil Rights Division starting in 2003 and a term of roughly seven months as its acting chief beginning in the spring of 2005.
Several former department lawyers assailed his treatment of senior employees and his rollback of longstanding policies aimed at protecting African-American voting rights. They blame him for driving veteran attorneys, including section chief Joseph Rich, to resign from their posts.
Rich recently told Congress that 15 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have resigned since 2005. Former employees of the Voting Rights Section told McClatchy of at least eight hires since then of employees with conservative political connections.
The Boston Globe, which obtained resumes of civil rights hires under the Freedom of Information Act, reported Sunday that seven of 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of either the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Rich, who left the agency on April 30, 2005, and now works for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told McClatchy Newspapers that Schlozman was “central to implementation of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division” and said he treated career lawyers with “disdain” and “vindictiveness.”
His former deputy, Robert Kengle, told McClatchy that “Schlozman was never wrong and to even raise that possibility was asking for retribution.”
Schlozman’s hiring favored lawyers “with one primary characteristic - links to the Republican Party and right-wing groups,” said David Becker, who left the section the same day as Rich.
“The lawyers hired by Schlozman, in virtually every case, had very little litigation experience, lesser academic credentials and, if they had any civil rights experience, it was in opposing the enforcement of civil rights laws,” Becker told McClatchy.
One of those hired, Joshua Rogers, had been a law clerk for Mississippi federal Judge Charles Pickering, whom President Bush nominated for an appeals court judgeship over objections from civil rights groups.
Shortly after assuming his new job, Rogers was the lone dissenter in a staff recommendation that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card - a law later found unconstitutional by a federal judge.
Schlozman said in the interview that staff “were only treated professionally” while he was in the Civil Rights Division and that in hiring, “I didn’t care what your ideological perspective was.”
He pointed to the recruitment of Mark Kappelhoff, a former counsel for the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, to head the division’s Criminal Section, and to the promotion of Chris Coates, a former ACLU voting counsel, to serve as the top deputy chief of the voting section.
Former department voting rights lawyers said politics had little or no bearing on Kappelhoff’s job - overseeing prosecution of human trafficking and police misconduct.
They said Coates seemed to grow more conservative after his superiors passed him over for a promotion in favor of an African-American woman, and he filed a reverse-discrimination suit. ++
The U.S. Attorney, the G.O.P. Congressman and the Timely Job Offer
ADAM COHEN, New york Times
May 4, 2007
There is yet another United States attorney whose abrupt departure from office is raising questions: Debra Wong Yang of Los Angeles. Ms. Yang was not fired, as eight other prosecutors were, but she resigned under circumstances that raise serious questions, starting with whether she was pushed out to disrupt her investigation of one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.
If the United States attorney scandal has made one thing clear, it is that the riskiest job in the Bush administration is being a prosecutor investigating a Republican member of Congress. Carol Lam, the United States attorney in San Diego, was fired after she put Randy Cunningham, known as Duke, in prison. Paul Charlton, in Arizona, was dismissed while he was investigating Rick Renzi. Dan Bogden, in Nevada, was fired while he was reportedly investigating Jim Gibbons, a congressman who was elected governor last year.
Ms. Yang was investigating Jerry Lewis, who was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Ms. Lam and most of the other purged prosecutors were fired on Dec. 7. Ms. Yang, in a fortuitously timed exit, resigned in mid-October.
Ms. Yang says she left for personal reasons, but there is growing evidence that the White House was intent on removing her. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. Yang.
He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé.
It is hard to see what put Ms. Yang on the White House list other than her investigation of Mr. Lewis, which threatened to pull in well-connected lobbyists, military contractors and Republican contributors. Ms. Yang, by all accounts, had a strong record. Alberto Gonzales hailed her as “one of the most respected U.S. attorneys in the country.”
The new job that Ms. Yang landed raised more red flags. Press reports say she got a $1.5 million signing bonus to become a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a firm with strong Republican ties. She was hired to be co-leader of the Crisis Management Practice Group with Theodore Olson, who was President Bush’s solicitor general and his Supreme Court lawyer in Bush v. Gore. Gibson, Dunn was defending Mr. Lewis in Ms. Yang’s investigation.
Several issues bear investigating. First, did Ms. Yang know or suspect that she might lose her job, and jump ship to avoid being fired? That is not hard to believe because Ms. Miers and Mr. Sampson were exchanging e-mail about dismissing her in mid-September, and she announced her departure in October. Ms. Yang served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which Mr. Gonzales has called “a small group of U.S. attorneys that I consult on policy matters.” That may have put her in a position to be tipped off in advance.
A second possibility is that Gibson, Dunn dangled a rich financial package before Ms. Yang to get her out, and to disrupt the investigation of Mr. Lewis. Ms. Yang, who says she left her job purely for personal reasons, may not have known she was being lured away by people with close ties to Mr. Lewis and the White House, who were hoping to replace her with a more partisan prosecutor.
Another possibility is that the timing of her departure was coincidental. That would make her lucky indeed: after more than 15 years of working for government, she decided to take a private sector job precisely when the White House counsel was apparently trying to fire her.
It is impossible to know how much of a setback Ms. Yang’s departure was to the investigation of Mr. Lewis. It could be that it slowed down after she left. It could also be that it is going forward just as it would have had she stayed. If it has not been affected, that could be because the close attention Congress and the press are paying to United States attorneys has prevented the White House from installing a “loyal Bushie,” in Mr. Sampson’s famous phrase.
United States attorneys serve, as the White House likes to point out, at the pleasure of the president. But if Ms. Yang, or any of the others, was pushed out to prevent justice from being done in a pending criminal matter, it would be a serious misuse of executive authority. It could also be obstruction of justice.
Congress is conducting closed-door interviews with Justice Department officials. That is important, but hardly enough. It is looking more and more as if the United States attorney dismissals were managed out of the White House. The way to put to rest the questions about Ms. Yang’s suspicious departure, and the firings of the other prosecutors, is to require that Ms. Miers, Mr. Rove and other White House officials tell what they know, in public and under oath. ++
U.S. Fights Off Bid to Punish UNESCO Official
Former Congressman Accused of Giving ‘Preferential Treatment’ on Contract to Chicago Firm
Colum Lynch, Washington Post
Sunday, May 6, 2007
UNITED NATIONS — The United States and its key allies last week fended off a campaign by developing countries to discipline UNESCO’s highest-ranking U.S. official, Peter Smith, a former Republican congressman from Vermont. Smith resigned in March after an audit found he granted “preferential treatment” to a Chicago-based consulting firm that received $2.15 million in contracts — often without competitive bidding.
The move placed the United States — which has long called for greater transparency and accountability at the United Nations — in the awkward position of opposing an initiative to improve accountability and fiscal integrity in the global body. Louise Oliver, the U.S. representative to UNESCO, recently told foreign delegates it is time to put the matter to rest and implement reforms Smith put in place before he left the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Smith, the most senior American hired by UNESCO since the United States temporarily withdrew from the organization in 1984, had served as the organization’s top education official since 2005. His appointment — along with first lady Laura Bush’s designation as honorary ambassador for the Decade of Literacy — symbolized a new era of U.S. engagement with UNESCO, which it had once derided as hostile to free speech and trade.
France’s court of auditors concluded in March that Smith, as UNESCO’s assistant director general for education, had repeatedly skirted U.N. procedures requiring that all contracts for more than $100,000 be subject to competitive bidding. The audit, commissioned by UNESCO, said Smith bypassed the requirement on behalf of Chicago-based Navigant Consulting by carving a nearly $400,000 deal into four separate contracts, including two valued at $99,899.
Smith subsequently opened the bidding to a broader group of six companies, but the process appeared arranged to ensure that Navigant — the only company that submitted a bid — prevailed, the audit showed. The list “considerably reduced, de facto, the possibility of a candidate other than Navigant Consulting submitting a bid,” the audit said. The bid resulted in three subsequent contracts totaling just less than $1.75 million.
Navigant was tasked with overseeing a reorganization of UNESCO’s education sector to emphasize the body’s regional education and literacy programs.
“The competitive bidding procedures were deliberately circumvented,” Phillipe Seguin, the president of the auditing court, told UNESCO’s board. “Nothing supports the notion that Navigant would be an obvious choice. . . . It had never worked with UNESCO and had no particular competence in the field of education.”
Smith declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement that bars current and former officials from discussing their work at UNESCO. But Smith told auditors that he split up the initial contracts to ensure leverage over the contractor. He also noted that all Navigant’s contracts were ultimately approved by UNESCO officials.
In a March 12 resignation letter, Smith alleged that he was the target of an anti-American upswell within UNESCO and that he had received death threats. “There is a small group who have worked steadily since the unveiling of the reform recommendations to kill the reforms by discrediting me, attacking you, and demonizing America,” he wrote.
U.S. officials suspected the campaign to discipline Smith was aimed at derailing efforts to make the agency more cost-effective. The United States contributes 22 percent of UNESCO’s $300 million budget.
Koïchiro Matsuura, UNESCO’s director general, declined to investigate whether Smith profited from the arrangement.
India, Algeria and Benin circulated a draft resolution last month urging Matsuura to “take appropriate disciplinary action” against Smith and others who violated U.N. rules. They also called on Matsuura to reinstate employees whose jobs Smith had eliminated, including an administrative officer who was reassigned to Beirut after challenging Smith’s actions.
“The audit has not gone far enough,” said South Africa’s representative, Brian Figaji, citing “unfair treatment dished out to those who chose to blow the whistle.”
But the United States, Japan and some European nations resisted the effort, and UNESCO’s board approved a compromise resolution expressing serious concern over irregularities in Smith’s department and calling on Matsuura to strengthen UNESCO’s procedures for preventing similar problems.
Smith first encountered Navigant through Letitia Chambers, a former executive director of the Commission on Higher Education who serves as Navigant’s Washington director, Seguin said. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.
Seguin sought repeatedly to examine e-mail exchanges between Smith and Navigant, but the company refused to furnish copies and UNESCO maintains that it deletes all e-mails after one month. ++
Waxman to Rice: Step Back
Paul Kiel, TP Muckraker
May 4, 2007
Here’s the latest volley in the ongoing battle between Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Waxman, the chairman of the House committee on oversight, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice today to complain that State Department officials had attempted to prevent a nuclear weapons anaylst at the department from speaking with his staff. This comes after Waxman’s committee issued a subpoena last week for Rice’s testimony on how she dealt with claims before the war that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Rice has said that she won’t comply with the subpoena.
Waxman said that when his staff sought to meet with Simon Dodge, a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a State Department official called and objected. According to Waxman, the official “informed Committee staff that you [Rice] were prohibiting Mr. Dodge from meeting with Committee investigators. This official claimed that allowing Mr. Dodge to speak with Committee staff would be ‘inappropriate’ because the Committee voted to issue a subpoena to compel your attendance at a hearing on your knowledge of the fabricated evidence.”
Waxman wants to speak to Dodge because he raised alarms about the Niger evidence two weeks before President Bush cited it in his State of the Union address in 2003.
Waxman said he was giving Rice the benefit of the doubt:
-
I assume that your legislative staff was acting without your authorization in this matter. It would be a matter of great concern - as well as an obvious conflict of interest - if vou had directed your staff to impede a congressional investigation into matter that may implicate your conduct as National Security Advisor.
Waxman informed Rice that the committee would be interviewing Dodge next week. And he also requested several documents from Rice “relating to the claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa.” ++
Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?
Frank Rich, NYT
Saturday, May 05, 2007
If, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA on any patsy they can find.
George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” (that’s the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a “cakewalk” in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were “three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” Richard Perle chimed in that the “huge mistakes” were “not made by neoconservatives” and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times “the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz.”
And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.
This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The good news is that Mr. Tenet’s book rollout may be the last gasp of this farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself as the war’s innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency’s bin Laden unit, has accused Mr. Tenet of lacking “the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.” Even after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence until he cashed in.
Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war’s enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues. Very little has changed between the fourth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” this year and the last. Back then, President Bush cheered an Iraqi “turning point” precipitated by “the emergence of a unity government.” Since then, what’s emerged is more Iraqi disunity and a major leap in the death toll. That’s why Americans voted in November to get out.
The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience, he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd’s defection to “personal turmoil.” If that is what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.
That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war’s creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers’ payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state’s recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch.
Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before “60 Minutes” broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth — before she too jumps ship.
It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. “The question of imminence isn’t whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow” is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were “worldwide” even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was “no evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud.
Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. “But that statement wasn’t true,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.
Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We’re all supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam’s nukes. Besides, there’s a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.
On ABC, she pushed the administration’s line portraying Iraq’s current violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006. But that Qaeda isn’t the Qaeda of 9/11; it’s a largely Iraqi group fighting on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had already been gathering steam for 15 months — in part because Ms. Rice and company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had ignored the alarms about bin Laden’s Qaeda in August 2001.
Ms. Rice’s latest canard wasn’t an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up for the president’s outrageous statement three days later. “The decision we face in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday, “is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11.” Such statements about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive — and no less damaging to our national interest — than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11 connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn’t get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice.
That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House’s Oversight Committee, whose chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about the uranium hoax since 2003.
Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin’s questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn’t recall or didn’t know.
No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice’s Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues “when I have a chance to write my book.” Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on “60 Minutes” but under oath. ++
Lawmakers Wants VA to Explain Bonuses
HOPE YEN, AP
Friday May 4, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional leaders on Thursday demanded that the Veterans Affairs secretary explain hefty bonuses for senior department officials involved in crafting a budget that came up $1 billion short and jeopardized veterans’ health care.
Rep. Harry Mitchell, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on oversight, said he would hold hearings to investigate after The Associated Press reported that budget officials at the Veterans Affairs Department received bonuses ranging up to $33,000.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, who heads the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said the payments pointed to an improper “entitlement for the most centrally placed or well-connected staff.” He has sent a letter to VA chief Jim Nicholson asking what the department plans to do to eliminate any bonuses based on favoritism.
“These reports point to an apparent gross injustice at the VA that we have a responsibility to investigate,” said Mitchell, D-Ariz. “No government official should ever be rewarded for misleading taxpayers, and the VA should not be handing out the most lucrative bonuses in government as veterans are waiting months and months to see a doctor.”
One member of the House committee, Rep. Phil Hare, D-Ill., called for Nicholson to resign.
A list obtained by the AP of bonuses to senior career officials in 2006 documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among those receiving payments were a deputy assistant secretary and several regional directors who crafted the VA’s flawed budget for 2005 based on misleading accounting. They received performance payments up to $33,000 each, a figure equal to about 20 percent of their annual salaries.
Also receiving a top bonus was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps manage a disability claims system that has a backlog of cases and delays averaging 177 days in getting benefits to injured veterans.
The bonuses were awarded even after government investigators had determined the VA repeatedly miscalculated - if not deliberately misled taxpayers - with questionable methods used to justify Bush administration cuts to health care amid the burgeoning Iraq war.
Annual bonuses to senior VA officials now average more than $16,000 - the most lucrative in government. All bonuses are proposed by division chiefs, then approved by Nicholson.
A VA spokesman said the payments are necessary to retain hardworking career officials. “Rewarding knowledgeable and professional career public servants is entirely appropriate,” spokesman Matt Burns said.
Several watchdog groups questioned the practice. They cited short-staffing and underfunding at VA clinics that have become particularly evident after recent disclosures of shoddy outpatient treatment of injured troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
“Hundreds of thousands of our veterans remain homeless every day and hundreds of thousands more veterans wait six months or more for VA disability claim decisions,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. “The lavish amounts of VA bonus cash would be better spent on a robust plan to cut VA red tape.”
In a letter to Nicholson, Akaka also asked the department to outline steps to address disparities in which Washington-based senior officials got higher payments than their counterparts elsewhere.
“Awards should be determined according to performance,” said Akaka, D-Hawaii. “I am concerned by this generous pat on the back for those who failed to ensure that their budget requests accurately reflected VA’s needs.”
Burns, who said the department is reviewing Akaka’s request, said many of the senior officials have the kind of experience that would be hard to replace.
“The importance of retaining committed career leaders in any government organization cannot be overstated,” Burns said.
VA officials characterized the agency’s Washington-based jobs as more difficult, often involving management of several layers of divisions that would justify the higher payments.
In 2006, the VA officials receiving top bonuses included Rita Reed, the deputy assistant secretary for budget, and William Feeley, a former VA network director who is now deputy undersecretary for health for operations and management.
Also receiving $33,000 was Ronald Aument, the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps oversee the strained and backlogged claims system that Nicholson now says is unacceptable.
In July 2005, the VA stunned Congress by suddenly announcing it faced a $1 billion shortfall after failing to take into account the additional cost of caring for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The admission, which came months after the department insisted it was operating within its means and did not need additional money, drew harsh criticism from both parties and some calls for Nicholson’s resignation.
In urging Nicholson to step down, Hare cited problems with accounting and data security that contributed to the loss of 26.5 million veterans’ personal data last year.
“Time and time again, Secretary Nicholson, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, opted to offer political spin instead of preparing for the inevitable influx of new veterans entering the system,” Hare said. “Veterans deserve a secretary that will fight for them.”
The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, determined the VA had used misleading accounting methods and claimed false savings of more than $1.3 billion, apparently because President Bush was not willing, at the time, to ask Congress for more money.
According to the White House Office of Personnel Management, roughly three of every four senior officials at the VA have received some kind of bonus each year. In recent years, the payment amount has steadily increased from being one of the lowest in government - $8,120 in 2002 - to the most generous - $16,713 in 2005.
In contrast, just over half the senior officials at the Energy Department in 2005 received an average bonus of $9,064. Across all government agencies, about two-thirds of employees received bonuses, which averaged $13,814 in 2005, the most recent data available. ++
The real scandal at the World Bank
The Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world
Johann Hari, Independent UK
26 April 2007
While the world’s press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie’s Washington offices.
This slo-mo scandal isn’t about apparent petty corruption in DC. It’s about how Wolfowitz’s World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world, and knowingly worsening our worst crisis - global warming - every day.
Let’s start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something, living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can’t afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps: “Am I supposed to drink air?”
She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari - a mother - is also thirsty. “The World Bank took away my right to clean water,” she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country’s water supply. So Maxima couldn’t afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug.
This dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen. “I wash my children weekly,” Maxima says. “Sometimes there’s only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their whole body … This is not a nice way to live.” The newly elected socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to take the water back - and he is, of course, condemned and threatened by the World Bank.
Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in Haiti - only he can’t grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the US government. The Haitian government barely exists and can’t offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.
Some 5,000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to open the country’s markets to international competition. Now he can’t compete with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.
How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if you told them none of this is considered a scandal, but business as usual?
These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an accurate summary of the World Bank’s effect on the poor. Don’t take my word for it. The World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of its borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and 2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The bank’s own former chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this approach “has condemned people to death… They don’t care if people live or die.”
Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book The Age of Consent, the World Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection of US power. The bank’s head is invariably American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permanent veto on policies. It does not promote a sensible mix of markets and state action - the real path to development.
No: the World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time.
The bank’s staff salve their consciences by pickling themselves in an ideology - neoliberalism - that says there is never a conflict between business rights and human rights. If it’s good for Shell, it must be good for poor people - right?
This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In 2000, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it, putting the former energy minister of the corporation-licking Indonesian dictator General Suharto in charge. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed. But - to everyone’s astonishment - Salim concluded by opposing the carbon-pumping oil and gas projects that make up 94 per cent of all the bank’s energy projects. He said they should be stopped altogether by 2008.
The bank’s response? It ignored its own report and carried on warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the actual climate. Feel the heat.
While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz’s alleged small corruption and ignore his organisation’s proven immense corruption, there is something we - ordinary citizens - can do.
In the summer of 2001, at the global justice protests in Genoa, I met Dennis Brutus, a former inmate of Robben Island prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He had been repelled by the bank’s actions in South Africa, and started his protests against them by asking a very basic question: who owns the World Bank? It turns out we do.
Ordinary people in the West - through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and private investments - own it.
The bank raises nearly all its funds by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History. So, Brutus realised, we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. “We need to break the power of the World Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa,” he explained.
The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as apartheid-era investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat to its “AAA” bond rating.
In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police hissed in the background, Brutus told me: “I lived to see the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid.”
This is the fight we should join. Not some petty squabble over which Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to lead the forces of subsidy-slashing and starvation. ++
When The Class War Goes Local
David Sirota, San Francsico Chronicle
May 07, 2007
When most non-Montanans think of Montana, they think of “A River Runs Through It.” They don’t think of the central front in the war on anything (except, maybe trout, if you consider fly fishermen warriors). But for the last week, this sparsely populated state has been the central front in the war on the middle class, and the onslaught Big Sky country experienced shows that this fight could be coming to a town near you.
Our story begins in the Montana legislature, though it could be anywhere, as this lawmaking body is a microcosm of America’s ideological divides. Democrats pushed to boost education spending and give each resident homeowner a $400 property tax rebate. To fund the plan, they proposed closing tax loopholes and strengthening tax enforcement in a state where roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies doing business get away with paying less than $500 a year in taxes.
But such a move offends conservative politicians and the corporate lobbyists who crowd the hallways of state capitols like the one in Helena—and these types don’t take lightly to being offended.
The GOP-controlled Montana House pressed a tax cut for corporations financed by spending cuts, including one eliminating all public-health programs. When last week it came time to negotiate a compromise, Republican class warriors dug in further, offering amendments to kill Democrats’ proposal to beef up corporate tax enforcement.
The result? The legislature ended without a budget, and Montana is now on the brink of its own version of the 1996 Gingrich-Clinton government shutdown. It is a troubling situation for middle-class Montanans, but for anti-government Republican politicians and lobbyists, it is a big victory in their war on the middle class.
Days later, Montana’s U.S. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat, joined Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in headlining an economic-development summit in Butte, a devastated city that is one of America’s all-too-common casualties in this economic war.
Once the bustling capital of the copper industry, Butte today is known for its salt-of-the-earth inhabitants and for its canyon-like Superfund site known as the Berkeley Pit—a defunct open-pit mine that the Anaconda Company abandoned with a pool of deadly chemicals at the bottom.
The captains of global finance attending this summit no doubt saw Butte’s boarded-up brick buildings and rusting mine shaft skeletons from the windows of their private jets that crowded the town’s airport. Yet, they delivered speeches as if they were attending an executive conference at a Caribbean resort.
Corporate leaders looked out over Butte’s wreckage and not only trumpeted the supposedly booming economy, but then berated worker protection laws and lavished praise on the “benefits” of free-trade policies—policies that have decimated wages and job security by forcing American workers, farmers and small businesses to compete in a global race to the bottom.
Executive Dan Rice of Printing for Less criticized Montana for being “an employee-slanted state;” for considering a bill asking businesses to take into account the environmental and community impact of their decisions; and, thus, for being hostile to job growth. He didn’t explain why, if this was true, Montana has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.
Similarly, the $20-million-a-year CEO of McGraw-Hill, Harold McGraw III, claimed America’s trade policies have “had a net positive impact on U.S. manufacturing jobs.” This, despite 3 million manufacturing jobs lost since the China free-trade pact was signed in 2000.
That so many major players trekked to Montana to read the same script proved this event wasn’t about local economic development—it was about making sure Baucus remains a reliable Washington ally in the war on the middle class. The Senate Finance Committee that he chairs oversees America’s economic and trade policies, and Baucus has been feeling pressure to stand up for his middle-class constituents after the Montana state Senate passed a resolution demanding he oppose more free-trade deals. Such volleys rarely go unanswered by Corporate America in this war, and so the big guns came to Butte to tell the locals to back off.
At a time of growing job insecurity, stagnating wages and Great Depression-level economic inequality, the 2006 election gave us reason to hope for change. But as events in Montana show, change will not come with one election, nor will it come easy. If the war on the middle class can make its wrath felt in a small state’s part-time legislature or cheerily propagandize at a decimated town’s economic-development meeting, you can bet it can—and will—come anywhere. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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