archived: 21 - 27 Sept, 2003         Back                 Next

SEPTEMBER 26, 2003 SPECIAL UPDATE

                BUSH’S “BETTER DAYS”

Any party which takes credit for the rain
must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.

-- Dwight Whitney Morrow

                “In July, President Bush [was] taking to the airwaves to reassure Americans that the U.S. economy is getting better if not now, then soon. ‘The American economy is headed in the right direction, and we can be confident of better days ahead," Bush said [in a] weekly radio address.  

                ‘My administration remains focused on faster economic growth that will translate into more jobs,’ the president said in his radio remarks.” – Investment Magazine                               

                Bush’s rhetoric is not matching reality.  Today, more reports are released demonstrating Bush’s pyrrhic rhetoric.  The numbers: -- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (emphasis added)  

Census data released today show that poverty increased and median household income fell in 2002 for the second consecutive year.  The number of poor people increased by 1.7 million to 34.6 million; the poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent to 12.1 percent; and median household income fell by $500, or 1.1 percent, to $42,409.  There were 3 million more poor people in 2002 than in 2000, the last year before unemployment began to rise. 

The rise in poverty and decline in median income primarily reflect the increase in unemployment in 2002.  The unemployment rate averaged 5.8 percent in 2002, up markedly from 4.7 percent in 2001 and 4.0 percent in 2000.

                The most recent trends are equally damning of Bush’s policies.  “More U.S. workers lost their jobs in large layoffs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, another sign that employers are continuing to trim payrolls even as the economy strengthens.

The BLS tracks what it calls "mass layoffs," or firings of more than 50 workers in a single month by a single employer, by compiling reports on initial claims for unemployment benefits filed with state agencies. The numbers include temporary and permanent firings.

            About 134,000 workers lost their jobs in 1,258 mass layoffs nationwide last month, up from the 128,103 employees who were fired in 1,248 such actions in August 2002, the bureau said.

            . . . “Manufacturing took the hardest hit of any sector in August, accounting for nearly a third of all mass layoffs and more than a third of the number of workers who lost jobs, the report said. Job losses were also reported in transportation equipment, textile mills, machinery and food manufacturing. 

            California, New York, Illinois, North Carolina and Texas had the most mass layoffs, the report said.

            . . .  Lewis Siegal, a BLS senior economist, said the overall numbers are not as bleak as they appear, because in many cases they do not represent "long-term layoffs." . . .  But some economists say many manufacturing jobs, such as those formerly held by textile-mill workers in North Carolina, are probably gone for good.  ‘We've got a sort of despair,’ said Harry E. Payne Jr., Chairman of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission. ‘Whatever resources the state has in terms of being able to help people are being greatly taxed.’" – Washington Post    

            “A report today . . .  showed . . . an unexpected drop in durable goods orders, triggering some concern about a long awaited revival in the nation's manufacturing sector. U.S. factories reported a 0.9% decline in orders for manufactured durable goods -- generally defined as products that are expected to last three years or more -- in August, marking the first such drop since April, the U.S. Commerce Department said. Orders fell $1.6 billion from the previous month to $173 billion.

            ‘Although the manufacturing sector has been in a modest recovery, this report indicates that the progress will not be smooth,’ said economist Steven Wood in a report for Insight Economics. ‘Further gains in consumer and capital spending, as well as some inventory rebuilding, will be necessary for the factory recovery to continue.’” – LA Times

            The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains what is impacting the increase in poverty and the decrease in median income:

“Misplaced priorities by Congress and the President are making the increase in poverty larger than it needs to be,” noted Center executive director Robert Greenstein.  “The temporary federal program Congress set up to help the long-term unemployed is significantly weaker than the comparable program established in the recession of the early 1990s.  That’s an important reason why the number of workers who ran out of those federal unemployment benefits without finding work was twice as big in 2002 as at a similar point in the last downturn.

“Also, Congress and the President chose to exclude low-income working families from the increased child tax credit benefits that went to better-off families this summer,” Greenstein added.  “Yet this year’s tax legislation will give people earning $1 million or more an average tax cut of $93,000.”

Greenstein also noted that federal fiscal relief to states has not been adequate and that the majority of states, facing budget shortfalls, have cut child care assistance for low-income working families, making it more difficult for those families to remain employed. – Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (emphasis added)  

                Are Bush’s “better days ahead?” 

                     “So far in 2003, unemployment has been higher than it was in 2002.  In addition, the number of long-term unemployed — those out of work more than half a year — has increased dramatically, from 650,000 a month in 2000, to 810,000 in 2001, 1.55 million in 2002, and an average of 1.89 million so far in 2003.  Adding to the deterioration of circumstances facing poor households, average hourly wages for low-paid workers also have fallen in 2003, and a number of states that faced budget deficits have instituted budget cuts in basic assistance programs in 2003.  These developments suggest that poverty may increase and incomes decline for a third straight year in 2003.” – Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (emphasis added)  

                Bush’s policy is underpinned in hypocrisy:  tax breaks for the rich while more working Americans slip into poverty; and spending millions on building Iraq’s infrastructure while the number of Americans unemployment has grown by almost 50% since he took office.  There may be better days – but not for the vast majority of working Americans.

            There is a reason we are Democrats! 
_____________________________________________

SEPTEMBER 25, 2003 UPDATE

                               THE BOTTOM LINE

            TPJ continues to follow the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.  Bush designated David Kay to head a team of some 1,400 experts who have been scouring Iraq in search of proof of WMD. 

            Kay’s team was to file a report several weeks ago, but the report was “delayed.”  The “final” report intended for the CIA may never be released.  Leaks from Kay’s team revealed that Saddam had no active nuclear weapons program. – TPJ, OBFUSCATING FABRICATIONS OF WAR

            Last night the BBC revealed more leaks from Kay’s team:

“The bottom line is that the team has found no weapons of mass destruction.”

            The major points are: -- BBC (emphasis added)

[I]it is highly unlikely that weapons of mass destruction were shipped out of the country to places like Syria before the US-led war on Iraq.

[T]he report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material".

They have also not uncovered any laboratories involved in deploying weapons of mass destruction and no delivery systems for the weapons.

[I]t . . . shows that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to develop a weapons of mass destruction program.

The inspectors have uncovered no evidence that any weapons were actually built in the immediate years before the war, the leak of the report suggests.

                "’It demonstrates that the main judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false,’" said the source. – Guardian Unlimited (England) 

            “In the wake of remarkable statements by the president, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice that no evidence exists that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks, the last pillar holding up the administration’s justification for invading Iraq has crumbled.

            During the Vietnam War, questions about the credibility of the U.S. government’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident—the event that triggered deep U.S. involvement in the conflict—did not become a major issue until the war started going badly. In the last few months, the same has happened in Iraq. As the chaos in Iraq subtly eroded the president’s popularity, the media, pundits and even normally cautious presidential candidates finally found the courage to question whether the administration hyped the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The administration’s latest admission should cause the already yawning credibility gap to widen further into criticism about putting American soldiers at risk unnecessarily in faraway lands.”  -- The Independent Institute

            Bush’s justifications for war have dissolved.  Bush’s classic neoconservative presentation to the UN has also failed.  “President Bush's appeal for greater financial and military support for the reconstruction of Iraq failed to elicit fresh pledges today as members of the United Nations demanded that the United States yield greater power to the U.N. and the Iraqis.  The cool reaction to Bush's address by delegates at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly's general debate reflected concern at the United Nations that a larger military force in Iraq will not enhance security in the country unless authority also is transferred to a transitional Iraqi authority with real power.” – Washington Post   

            “Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general,  . . . warned that pre-emptive unilateral military action without the authorization of the UN risked a move to the law of the jungle.

            ‘My concern is that it could set precedents resulting in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification,’ Mr Annan told the assembly to sustained applause. He did not mention the United States by name. As a result of the Iraqi crisis, the UN, he said, was at a ‘fork in the road’.” – Independent (England)    

                The political consequences Kofi Annan warns of have already started.  “Oil prices surged on Wednesday as Opec producers said they would cut oil production by 900,000 barrels a day from their current daily output of 25.4m barrels.

            ‘"Opec surprised 95 per cent of the people that follow the oil price,’ said one London-based oil analyst. The production cuts start from November 1.” – Financial Times

            Molly Ivans sums it up in her unique style:

[S]uddenly, in the greatest bait and switch of all time, Osama bin Laden doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9-11. But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction. So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us. By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to say, "Wha' the hey?"

We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year, and no one knows how long we'll be there. And still poor Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a president.

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grown-ups can do that, you know -- decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred. Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies. If that make me a Bush-hater, then sign me up. _____________________________________________

SEPTEMBER 23, 2003 UPDATE

                               “THERE ARE TRUTHS WHICH CAN KILL A NATION.” –
                               Jean Giraudoux [1882 – 1944]

            More revelations are surfacing proving that Bush is concealing the potentially deadly truth about global warming.  The conclusion reached is that “White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal.” – The Observer

            The Observer’s expose details four methods by which Bush is derailing scientific research:  – The Observer

Emails and internal government documents . . . show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious.  . . .   White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as 'potentially' and 'may', leading the EPA to complain: 'Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.'

Bush's staff insisted on major amendments to the climate change section of an environmental survey of the US, published last June. One alteration indicated 'that no further changes may be made'. 

[Bush’s administration] enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.

‘Email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official US government report on global warming dangers,' said Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut . . . .

Modifying government reports, enlisting conservative lobbying groups to attack scientific research, and bastardizing the judicial process to weaken environmental protections; all are the hallmark of Bush’s leadership and a deliberate plan to dismantle environmental protections that have taken generations to build.

                TPJ featured an early article warining of Bush’s alteration of official government scientific reports.  “’The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs.

                . . .  Drafts of the climate section, with changes sought by the White House, were given to The New York Times yesterday by a former E.P.A. official, along with earlier drafts and an internal memorandum in which some officials protested the changes. Two agency officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the documents were authentic.

                The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.

            Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion. TPJ Archive – A Blind Eye – Deadly Ignorance (emphasis added)

                The Observer could have added even more evidence to its expose.  The public is generally aware that Bush would not join the Kyoto treaty.  Readers should consider the broad range and depth of initiatives Bush has undertaken to dismantle environmental protections (links to specific news sources may no longer be active, links to TPJ are current):

After more than two years of internal deliberation and intense pressure from industry, the Bush administration has settled on a regulation that would allow thousands of older power plants, oil refineries and industrial units to make extensive upgrades without having to install new anti-pollution devices, according to those involved in the deliberations. The new rule, a draft of which was made available to The New York Times by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, would constitute a sweeping and cost-saving victory for industries, exempting thousands of industrial plants and refineries from part of the Clean Air Act.  TPJ – Abandoning the Environment

President George Bush is targeting the international treaty to save the ozone layer which protects New US demands - tabled at a little-noticed meeting in Montreal earlier this month - threaten to unravel one of the greatest environmental success stories of the past few decades, causing millions of deaths from cancer. . . . Mr. Bush is undermining the ozone treaty as well, by seeking to perpetuate the use of the most ozone-destructive chemical still employed in developed countries, otherwise soon to be phased out. Ironically, it was sustained pressure from the Reagan administration, in which Mr. Bush's father served as vice-president that ensured the treaty was adopted in the first place. It has proved such a success that environmentalists have long regarded it as inviolable.” – Independent; TPJ Archive – Scrubbing the Environment   

The Bush administration has been gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any other environmental legislation. It has crippled the Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and vinyl chloride in more than 1,000 neighborhoods in 48 states. It has sought to cut the EPA's enforcement division by nearly one-fifth, to its lowest level on record; fines assessed for environmental violations dropped by nearly two-thirds in the administration's first two years; and criminal prosecutions-the government's weapon of last resort against the worst polluters-are down by nearly one-third.  The administration has abdicated the decades-old federal responsibility to protect native animals and plants from extinction, becoming the first not to voluntarily add a single species to the endangered species list. It has opened millions of acres of wilderness-including some of the nation's most environmentally sensitive public lands-to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Under one plan, loggers could take 10 percent of the trees in California's Giant Sequoia National Monument; many of the Monument's old-growth sequoias, 200 years old and more, could be felled to make roof shingles. Other national treasures that have been opened for development include the million-acre Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, the 2,000-foot red-rock spires at Fisher Towers, Utah, and dozens of others.” – Mother Jones ; TPJ Archive – Destroying The Environment  

“[Bush’s] 9/11 Special Master denounced Staten Island as a ‘Third World country.’ Now President George Bush has declared war on the residents of this borough using weapons of mass destruction – chemical poisons that would be outlawed in any conflict against Iraq, al Qaeda or the other enemies of the United States.  That is not an overly dramatic analysis of what the effects could be on Staten Island of the shocking new Bush environmental policy which was dropped like a bombshell when the White House thought that the fewest number of people would be looking.  On November 22 the Bush Administration announced what The New York Times has called ‘the most sweeping move in a decade to loosen industrial air pollution rules.’ And nowhere in the nation will the effects of that loosening be felt more dramatically than on Staten Island.  TPJ Archive – Scrubbing the Environment  

With White House backing, the Defense Department has asked Congress to approve a program it calls the ‘Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative,’ which would broadly exempt military bases and some operations from environmental regulation.” – NYT; TPJ Archive –  Environment Interferes With War On Terrorism   

The major land acquisition programs suffered most [budget] damage, in particular the venerable Land and Water Conservation Fund, which President Bush had grandly promised during his 2000 campaign to "fully fund" at $900 million. The House, in full nose-thumbing mode, cut that figure to a measly $198 million.  . . .  One would at least have expected some annoyance from Mr. Bush at the contempt with which Mr. Taylor and the Republicans treated his campaign pledge on open space. So far, however, there has not been a murmur from the White House.” – New York Times;  TPJ Archive -- Republicans Continue Environment Assault   

                As suggested in the Observer expose, the Bush and the Republican Party know exactly what they are doing and have even developed a specific political strategy to deal with dismantlement of environmental programs:

 The US Republican party is changing tactics on the environment, avoiding ‘frightening’ phrases such as global warming, after a confidential party memo warned that it is the domestic issue on which George Bush is most vulnerable.  The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has ‘lost the environmental communications battle’ and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases. ‘The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science,’ Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organization. ‘Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.  The phrase ‘global warming’ should be abandoned in favor of ‘climate change’, Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as ‘conservationist’ instead of ‘environmentalist’, because ‘most people’ think environmentalists are ‘extremists’ who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behavior... that turns off many voters’.  TPJ Archive -- The Environment – A Weapon Of Mass Destruction & TPJ Archive – Double Talk

                When it came to the health risks of 9-11, Bush directly lied by withholding the truth from the citizens of New York.  EPA employees wrote this public apology, which could equally apply to Bush’s policies as a whole:

We, the undersigned representatives of the workers who perform health and environmental protection duties at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency across America, express our anger and dismay over evidence of the White House’s improper actions in connection with communicating health risk information to emergency workers and residents in New York immediately following the terror attacks on that city on September 11, 2001.

. . .  The President’s political appointees’ interference with the professional work of the EPA Civil Service has seriously harmed EPA’s credibility.  Before there is another national emergency, that credibility must be restored.            

The President must pledge to never again order EPA to tell less than the whole truth about a public health emergency. – NTEU Chapter 280