Ammo Dump

ECONOMY/ CLASS WAR/
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071804J.shtml
This is the Fight of Our Lives
By Bill Moyers
Keynote Speech -- Inequality Matters Forum, New York University
Thursday 3 June 2004

[Excerpts:]
... Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of ten of them in working families - are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
...
In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold....

I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.

We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder." ....

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's premier investigative journalists - Donald Bartlett and James Steele - concluded in a series last year that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many." Economic inequality begets political inequality, and vice versa.
...
Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' " Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
...
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
...
In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy - a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds - and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won."

Look at the spoils of victory:

Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts - almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.

Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.

Cuts in taxes on investment income.

And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.
...
There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
...
Once upon a time I thought the mass media - my industry - would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. After all, the sight of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media.

What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes - there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.
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LIES/
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/elections/article.adp?id=20040714143009990001
GOP Governor Blasts Bush Administration, Kerry
AP 07/14/04
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (July 14) - Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney criticized the Bush administration on Wednesday, saying the government engages in wasteful spending and often gives money to ensure Republican votes.

The government doles out money "based on who will vote for us or for our party: in effect, we buy votes," Romney said in remarks prepared for delivery. "We fund programs that don't work. We tolerate abuse and cheating in the multiples of billions of dollars."

The GOP governor is a former businessman who was CEO and president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic games.

Romney also criticized Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, arguing that his ties to trial lawyers and labor unions make the Democratic candidate "too conflicted to be president."

The GOP governor said it is difficult for the four-term Massachusetts senator to take clear positions on issues such as health care and education based on his connections to unions.

"He wants a leaner government, but he can't face down the public employee unions. He is quick to point out the obvious flaws in the Iraq military campaign, but slow to tell us what he would do from here, for he wishes to appease as long as possible both those in his party who want to walk away and those who want to finish the job," Romney said.

Responding to the criticism, Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said it was "disappointing to see George W. Bush sending out yet another lemon-sucking surrogate to push his attack campaign. This president should spend more time attacking the problems of the American people and less time attacking John Kerry."
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LIES/ ECOLOGY/ ECONOMY/ HEALTH/
www.twincities.com
4,000 say Bush holding back science
Los Angeles Times 07/09/04

WASHINGTON — More than 4,000 scientists — including 48 Nobel Prize winners and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences — accused the Bush administration Thursday of distorting and suppressing science to suit its political goals.

"Across a broad range of policy areas, the administration has undermined the quality and independence of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government's outstanding scientific personnel," the scientists said in a letter.

The administration has been criticized for misusing and ignoring science to further its policy aims. The list of signatures collected by the Union of Concerned Scientists suggested that the issue had become worrisome across the scientific community.

Administration officials rejected the criticism Thursday, just as they did when the same letter was released in February bearing the names of 62 prominent scientists.

John Marburger, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the letter and a report released simultaneously by the Union of Concerned Scientists made "sweeping generalizations based on a patchwork of disjointed facts and accusations that reach conclusions that are wrong and misleading."

But the scientists cited examples of esteemed colleagues denied seats on advisory panels because of their political beliefs.

Gerald Keusch, who left his post at the National Institutes of Health as associate director for international research and director of the Fogarty International Center, said the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had rejected 19 of his 26 candidates for the center's board over three years.

Among the 19 was a Nobel laureate who, Keusch said, was turned down because his name had appeared in newspaper advertisements criticizing the Bush administration for manipulating science.

HHS spokesman Bill Pierce stressed that the appointments to many NIH panels, such as the Fogarty International Center, are made by the secretary, not NIH directors.

"I completely reject the notion that the Bush administration is manipulating government science to bolster its policy aims," he said. "There's no evidence."

But Janet Rowley, a member of the President's Advisory Council on Bioethics, said she had seen examples of the misuse of science first-hand.

"This administration distorts scientific knowledge on stem cell research, which makes it increasingly difficult to have an honest debate in a field that holds promise for treatment of many serious diseases like Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes," Rowley said.

Dr. Richard Myers, director of Stanford University's Human Genome Center, said he was rejected for a seat on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research after he told an administration official that it was "inappropriate" to ask him about his opinion of Bush, according to the report compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was later given the post after an NIH director interceded on his behalf.
***
See also, among others:
Polluters get break after Bush funding -- Analysis says polluters funded GOP, got breaks Los Angeles Times 05/23/04
When Science was Thwarted Before - International Herald Tribune 04/10/04
Giving Science the Brushoff - International Herald Tribune 04/10/04
The Talk of the Town -- ON THE AIR The New Yorker 05/09/04
Spinning Health - New York Times 03/27/04

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Topic(s): Liberal Satire
Link:
http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4027&n=3

The Onion VOLUME 40 ISSUE 27 AMERICA'S FINEST NEWS SOURCE 7 JULY 2004

Nation’s Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue

WASHINGTON, DC—According to a study released Monday by the Hammond Political Research Group, many of the nation's liberals are suffering from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.
Flauman has trouble mustering outrage over Republican policy.
Above: Flauman has trouble mustering outrage over Republican policy.

"With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it's simply too daunting for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger," said Rachel Neas, the study's director. "By our estimation, roughly 70 percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and exorbitant military expenditures."

San Francisco's Arthur Flauman is one liberal who has chosen to take a hiatus from his seething rage over Bush Administration policies.

"Every day, my friends send me e-mails exposing Bush's corrupt environmental policies," said Flauman, a member of both the Green Party and the Sierra Club. "I used to spend close to an hour following all the links, and I'd be shocked and outraged by the irreversible damage being done to our land. At some point, though, I got annoyed with the demanding tone of the e-mails. The Clear Skies Initiative is bogus, but I'm not going to forward a six-page e-mail to all my friends—especially one written by a man who signs his name 'Leaf.' Now, if a message's subject line contains the word 'Bush,' it goes straight into the trash."

Neas found that many survey participants who attended protests against the war in Iraq in 2003 could barely summon the energy to read newspaper articles about the subject in 2004.

Portland, OR resident Suzanne Marshal compared herself to an addict, needing increasingly large doses of perceived injustices to achieve a state of anger.

"Even though I know how seriously messed-up the situation is in Iraq, I've became inured to all but the most extreme levels of wrongdoing," Marshal said. "For months, no amount of civilian bombing could get me mad. Then those amazing photos of the tortured Iraqi prisoners hit the streets, and I got that old rush of overwhelming disgust with my government. Then more photos came out, and more officials were implicated, and now—I don't know. It's like a switch in my head turned off again."

Neas said that the danger of fatigue was greater among liberals who regularly seek cause for outrage.

"For a while, I wanted more fuel for the fire, to really get my blood boiling," said Madison, WI resident Dorothy Levine, a reproductive-rights activist and former Howard Dean campaign volunteer. "I read the policy papers on the Brookings web site. I subscribed to The Progressive. I clipped cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall. I listened to NPR all day. But then, it was like, while I was reading Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked, eight more must-read anti-Bush books came out. It was overwhelming. By the time they released Fahrenheit 9/11, I was too exhausted to drag myself to the theater."

"It used to be that I would turn on Pacifica Radio and be incensed at the top of every hour," Levine added. "Now, I could find out that Bush plans to execute every 10th citizen and I'd barely blink an eye, much less raise a finger."

Of the liberals afflicted with fatigue, many said they are still haunted by the specters of their former outrage.

"I can't even look at the back of my Volvo anymore," said one Syracuse, NY liberal who wished to remain anonymous. "My 'Lick Bush' and 'Four More Wars' bumper stickers just remind me of the angry feelings I can't sustain. I still have a MoveOn.org sign hanging up in my cubicle at work, but if someone starts to talk about Cheney, I can't take it. I'm like, 'Yes, we all hate Cheney. He's an evil puppet-master. Yes, Bush is dumb. This is obvious. How many times can we say it? Now, excuse me, will you let me through so I can microwave my burrito?'"


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