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archived: 4 - 10 Jul, 2004 Back Next
TPJ wishes its readers a memorable 4th of July. We have much to be grateful for in America. We face challenges assuredly as each preceding generation has faced its challenges. TPJ salutes America and its challenges in today’s Junkies Speak. * * * * * BUSH’S “TRICKLE DOWN” IS BUT A DROP Bush touts his economic recovery with press release headlines like this one from May, 2004: Over 1.5 Million Jobs Created Since August with 10 Straight Months of Job Gains As noted previously in TPJ, the American economy must generate about 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with people entering the job market. So, the math is simple. Creating 1.5 million jobs in ten months means that Bush’s “recovery” has generated barely enough jobs to keep apace of new workers looking for jobs. The unemployment rate remains 5.6%, evidencing further proof that America is not gaining ground. In June, business and government leaders expected 250,000 new jobs would be added. Wrong! The economy added just 112,000 jobs. – LA Times The unemployment rate remained at 5.6%. Bush’s pronouncement of economic recovery also hides some startling figures of disparity in the recovery. Unemployment remains high for various groups: -- US Dept. of Labor
teenagers (16.8 percent) Not counted in the official unemployment rate is over a million workers who have given up looking for a job or who have not looked for a job in the past four weeks. Consider their plight: The number of persons who were marginally attached to the labor force was 1.5 million in June, about the same as a year earlier. (Data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals wanted and were available to work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed, however, because they did not actively search for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. There were 478,000 discouraged workers in June, the same as a year earlier. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, were not currently looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs were available for them. The other 1.0 million marginally attached had not searched for work for reasons such as school or family responsibilities. -- US Dept. of Labor The import of the most recent data is that Bush’s recovery is, at best, not getting anywhere fast and is insufficient to reduce unemployment in the United States. The LA Times noted:
[T]he June jobs report included evidence
of several kinds of economic weakness and crystallized a sense that
rising gasoline prices, higher interest rates and a trailing off of the
Bush-engineered tax cuts may finally be taking an economic toll. On chart paints the picture:
In short, Bush’s almost messianic commitment to tax cuts favoring the richest Americans has brought little in the way of an economic recovery. America’s workers are barely treading water. For millions of Americans who have simply given up looking for work, they have simply been drowned. Bush styles himself as a responsible corporate leader who is running America on principals of fiscal responsibility and prudent management. Test Bush’s “promise” against these facts: [T[he British humanitarian group Christian Aid assailed “the U.S.-controlled coalition in Baghdad” for “handing over power … without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq’s own money.” . . . [T]he GAO said, “Transactions worth billions of dollars in Iraqi funds have not been independently reviewed or the results reported.” – People’s Weekly World News _______________
The Bush administration has declared war on science. In the Orwellian world of 21st century America, two plus two no longer equals four where public policy is concerned, and science is no exception. When a right-wing theory is contradicted by an inconvenient scientific fact, the science is not refuted; it is simply discarded or ignored. . . .
Egregious examples abound. Over-the-counter morning-after contraceptive sales are banned, despite the recommendation for approval by an independent panel of the Food and Drug Administration review board. The health risks of mercury were discounted by a White House staffer who simply crossed out the word "confirmed" from a phrase describing mercury as a "confirmed public health risk." A National Cancer Institute fact sheet is doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that. Reports on the status of minority health and the importance of breast feeding are similarly watered down to appease right-wing ideologies. . . .
Recently, a scientist and a bioethics professor were dismissed from the blue-ribbon Council on Bioethics when they disagreed with the Bush administration's proposed ban on new stem-cell line development to cure a variety of diseases. In a similar vein and an unusual move, the nomination of public health experts to a CDC lead paint advisory panel were rejected by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, and replaced with researchers with financial ties to the lead industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists, with 20 Nobel laureates and several former scientific advisers to Republican presidents, has issued a scathing Report on Scientific Integrity condemning these practices. – Howard Dean _________________
[W]e should be discussing the most
effective and innovative ways to meet Kyoto and become a modern, efficient
nation. WOMEN Bush’s record on women’s issues is disturbing. Consider these “accomplishments:” Mr. Bush issued the global gag rule, an executive order that denies U.S. government assistance to family planning or reproductive health agencies in other countries that make any reference to abortion in the course of counseling or providing services to their clients. . . .
This year, Congress approved $34 million for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), but the White House is balking at releasing the money. This is the third consecutive year that UNFPA money appropriated by Congress has been withheld, forcing the closing of dozens of reproductive health clinics that often were the sole source of medical help for miles around.
[I]n 2002, the National Cancer Institute reworked its Web site to claim that studies examining links between abortion and breast cancer were inconclusive. In reality, five years earlier, The New England Journal of Medicine had published an exhaustive study that showed there was no link whatsoever. The people affected were women, in this country and overseas. . . .
Under the Bush administration, the United States has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The treaty has been ratified by 170 countries. . . .
Ten years ago, at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, 179 countries agreed on a Program of Action that empowers women in many different ways. . . .Yet the Bush administration has worked against the Cairo agreement in every follow-up meeting for the past three years, undermining the international community's efforts in this area and putting another roadblock in the way of funding women's health initiatives. – Baltimore Sun BUSH’S FAILED PROMISES Bush 2000 promised to bring Americans new leadership devoted to “accountability.” Test Bush’s promise against these developments over just the past several weeks: Bush’s administration is seeking to prevent government scientists from appearing before the World Health Organization unless approved by a “political appointee.” “Officials at the WHO, based in Geneva, Switzerland, have refused to implement the request, saying it could compromise the independence of international scientific deliberations.” – Yahoo _______________
Baghdad is awash with stories of the corruption, cronyism and incompetence of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which was dissolved this week. Many of its officials were in Iraq because they were ideological neo-conservatives or were simply well connected to the Republican Party or the White House.
Some were paid astonishing salaries. Ahmed al-Rikaby, in charge of re-establishing Iraqi television, discovered that he was to be assisted by three Iraqi-American media advisers paid $21,000 (£11,600) a month. He recalls: "They had no expertise and never helped me or anybody else." They got the jobs because they had influential friends in the Pentagon. . . .
Iraqis often say they were astonished by the level of cronyism in Washington's appointments. Privatisation was a high priority for the US administrator, Paul Bremer. But his chief aide in developing the private sector was a Republican businessman from Connecticut called Thomas Foley who was an assiduous fund-raiser for his party but otherwise had little experience useful in Iraq. – Independent (England) BUSH FRITZ’D Sen. Fritz Hollings is retiring at the end of his term – but is leaving the Senate warning Americans of what Bush has done. In 1996, a task force was formed in Jerusalem including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. They submitted a plan for Israel to incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Clean Break. It proposed that negotiations with the Palestinians be cut off and, instead, the Mideast be made friendly to Israel by democratizing it. First Lebanon would be bombed, then Syria invaded on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. Afterward, Saddam Hussein was to be removed in Iraq and replaced with a Hashemite ruler favorable to Israel.
The plan was rejected by Netanyahu, so Perle started working for a similar approach to the Mideast for the United States. Taking on the support of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld et al., he enlisted the support of the Project for the New American Century.
The plan hit paydirt with the election of George W. Bush. Perle took on the Defense Policy Board. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith became one, two and three at the Defense Department, and Cheney as vice president took Scooter Libby and David Wurmser as his deputies. Clean Break was streamlined to go directly into Iraq.
Iraq, as a threat to the United States, was all contrived. . . .
President Bush must have known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We have no al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorism from Iraq; we were intentionally misled by the Bush administration. . . .
After 15 months, Iraq has yet to be secured. Its borders were left open after "mission accomplished," allowing terrorists throughout the Mideast to come join with the insurgents to reek havoc. As a result, our troops are hunkered down, going out to trouble spots and escorting convoys.
In the war against terrorism, we've given the terrorists a cause and created more terrorism. Even though Saddam is gone, the majority of the Iraqi people want us gone. We have proven ourselves "infidels." With more than 800 GIs killed, 5,000 maimed for life and a cost of $200 billion, come now the generals in command, both Richard Myers and John Abizaid, saying we can't win. Back home the cover of The New Republic magazine asks, "Were We Wrong?"
Walking guard duty tonight in Baghdad, a G.I. wonders why he should lose his life when his commander says he can't win and the people back home can't make up their mind. Unfortunately, the peoples of the world haven't changed their minds. They are still against us. Heretofore, the world looked to the United States to do the right thing. No more. The United States has lost its moral authority. Junkie: Amen, Fritz! BUSH HAGLE’D Sen. Hollings’ attack on Bush is not simply partisan politics. Sen. Chuck Hagle, Nebraska, wades in to the expose of Bush’s failed neoconservative foreign policy. In a sharp critique of the leader of his own party, Hagel said he believes the occupation of Iraq by the American military was poorly planned and has spread terrorist cells more widely around the world.
"This put in motion a new geographic dispersion" of the terrorists, said Hagel, 58, in an interview before delivering a speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles. "It's harder to deal with them because they're not as contained. Iraq has become a training ground." . . .
In another area in which Hagel's views differ sharply from the president's, he suggested that the best way to ultimately win the war on terror is to earn the trust and respect of foreigners, especially younger people in the Arab world and other parts of the globe. The best way to do that, he said, is to make the United States more accessible to them and more open to immigration.
"We are pushing away our friends, our allies, the next generation around the world," Hagel said. – SF Gate BUSH CIA’D "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," is being released. It is written by a ranking CIA official who will be identified only as “Anonymous.” Preliminary details of the book’s contents are astounding: In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, CIA analysts were ordered repeatedly to redo intelligence assessments concluded that Al Qaeda had no operational ties to Iraq, according to a veteran CIA counter-terrorism official who has written a book that is sharply critical of the decision to go to war with Iraq. . . .
Asked whether he attributed the demands to an eagerness among officials at the White House or the Pentagon to find evidence of a link, he said: "You could not help but assume that was the case. They knew the answer [they wanted] before they asked the question."
The book was approved for publication by
the CIA after a four-month review — creating an unusual situation in which
one of the secretive agency's senior officers was offering public
criticism of administration policies and the prosecution of the war on
terrorism. “The author of the much-rumored Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror has been identified by the Boston Phoenix. It's Michael Scheuer. Who spent 1996-99 as chief of the CIA counterterrorism force assigned to Osama Bin Laden.” – Modern World
Last Update: 05/07/2006 |
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