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March 3, 2006

National Guard veteran's widow hopes to get pentacle engraved on husband's memorial

The Goddess brings us news that National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart's Northern Nevada Veterans' Memorial Cemetery memorial is blank. Stewart died in Afghanistan in September when his Chinook helicopter was shot down. He was a member of the Wiccan religion, which is not recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs for use in veterans' cemeteries. Consequently, his widow's request that a pentacle, the symbol of Wicca, be placed on his memorial, was denied.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and its National Cemetery Administration prohibit graphics on government-furnished headstones that have not been approved as "emblems of belief."

It is obvious from the lengthy list of already-approved emblems that the NCA has been willing to recognize a wide variety of religions, and so it is no surprise that Lt. Col. Robert Harrington, battalion commander of the Nevada National Guard, believes that Stewart will get his pentacle. Roberta Stewart says that she has received a lot of support from the military community to have the emblem included, and Congressman Jim Gibbons has stated he would like to see the Department of Veterans Affairs act quickly on the application.

Avoiding the Torture Ban

Good to see that the Justice Department is taking Congress' ban on torture seriously:

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as "systematic torture."

...."Unfortunately, I think the government's right; it's a correct reading of the law," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."

Oh, it's one of those unenforceable torture bans. Well why didn't anyone say so? If anyone knows any Kafka references that aren't stale and overused yet, let us know, we could use a fresh supply. Meanwhile, Kevin Drum's probably right to blame John McCain here (although the Bush administration is obviously the main problem here). Whether McCain intended all of this to happen or not, it's pretty clear that when he agreed to the Graham amendment in the same anti-torture bill, which stripped Guantanamo detainees of their right to challenge their detention in federal court, he pretty much did exactly what the White House wanted him to do. As Kevin says: "[McCain]'s certainly mastered the art of sounding reasonable, but it's only an inch deep. Underneath, he's just a standard issue right wing politician."

It might be worse than "standard issue." Digby notes that McCain is currently wildly popular around the country, among both Republicans and Democrats. That's going to be something to watch in the coming years, especially if he runs for president in 2008. All things considered, McCain is even more radical than Bush, especially on foreign policy—among other things, he's talked about ramping up the number of troops in Iraq and going after Iran with military force. And apart from a somewhat sensible approach to the environment—which will no doubt get scuttled once those "bundled" industry donations start pouring in, come 2007—he's not "liberal" in any sense of the word.

Census Survey Program to Be Cut

Dean Baker reports that the Bush administration is proposing to cut the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Why? Presumably it's not just because of the money—the extremely valuable data-gathering program only costs about $40 million a year, or about six hours worth of the Iraq war. Or perhaps it's, as Baker suggests, because the White House wants "to reduce the flow of bad economic news."

Either way, it's a bad idea. Back in the early 1990s, conservatives used to talk about how they would subject every liberal social program out there to a rigorous evaluation, to see if actually worked or not. But it's kind of hard to do that if there isn't any actual data. On the other hand, it's also a lot harder to judge the Bush administration if there isn't any actual data to use. Which seems to fit in the general trend here.

How Effective is Foreign Aid?

Every now and again, William Easterly, a former World Bank official and development expert, will appear on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and tell everyone that foreign aid doesn't really work all that well in places like Africa, taking a jab at Jeffrey Sachs and all those other good-intentioned "foreign aid" liberals out there in the process. And no doubt, it's good to remember that more than a few grandiose aid projects have ended in disaster, but it's another thing to say that foreign aid is hopeless, now and forever.

Anyway, Amartya Sen has a good review of Easterly's new book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, that takes a more nuanced view here. Among other things, he notes that even according to Easterly's own data, aid efforts haven't really done as "much ill" as advertised, although often they do do "little good." But sometimes they do a lot of good. And it's not like aid efforts are impossible to improve. As Sen notes, Easterly's detailed (and valuable) observations and research put him in a position to offer constructive advice, but his "useful hints at balanced evaluation come amid deafening outbursts against the advocates of aid."

Sen's more optimistic view on aid makes sense, I think; a few months ago I wrote an article that found a good deal of evidence that aid to poor countries actually works much better than the pessimists say (although the current aid regime obviously isn't perfect). One could also note that aid in the past hasn't always come at the behest of well-meaning liberals. As one researcher I talked to showed, the Cold War and various geopolitical considerations, rather than development concerns, influenced a lot of Western aid-giving patterns. Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that aid didn't always lead to growth.

(Not to mention the fact that conflicts, wars, and coups triggered by the United States and the Soviet Union in the Third World during the Cold War negated whatever "good" effects aid might have had—Branko Milanovic has argued that conflict has caused a 40 percent income loss in developing countries over the past twenty years; presumably it was much higher before then.)

Meanwhile, as John Perkins' thinly-argued but wholly plausible book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, suggests, a variety of Western development projects have often been carried out with the express purpose of doing nothing more than looting and pillaging the Third World to the benefit of Western business. Indeed, much aid still follows this pattern, as when developing nations receive restricted "loans" with which they can only purchase things from the original donor country. The foreign aid plotline doesn't exactly run: "Western country tries to do some well-intentioned stuff that just doesn't work out." Maybe sometimes that's true, but certainly not always.

March 2, 2006

Police chief accused of denying CPR to gay man

From Poverty Barn comes the news that in Welch, West Virginia, Police Chief Bobby Bowman has been has been accused in a federal lawsuit of impeding a rescuer from saving the life of 43-year-old Claude Green, who died of a heart attack in June. According to Green's friend, Billy Snead, who performed chest compressions on Green, Bowman ordered him to get away and said that Green was HIV positive.

"He was a police officer so I got out the way. I assumed he would help. I didn't want to be a hindrance," Snead said. "He also told the ambulance drivers that he was HIV positive and to be careful."

Bowman denies that he he refused Green CPR and calls the accusation a "boldface lie" (obviously, he meant a "bald-faced lie"). Rose Saxe, an attorney with the ACLU AIDS Project said that Bowman's alleged actions not only contributed to Green's death (he died half an hour after arriving at the hospital), but also violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Says Saxe: “It’s hard to say what was more shameful: that Chief Bowman assumed Claude Green was HIV positive solely because he was gay, or that Bowman was so ignorant about HIV that he felt you couldn’t safely perform CPR on an HIV positive person.”

Media Offices Stormed in Kenya

Last night close to a hundred hooded men armed with AK-47s stormed the Standard Newspaper’s central office in Nairobi, Kenya, destroying papers and temporarily halting production. The raid, which was carried out simultaneously with one on the Kenya Television Network, involved the destruction of printing presses, the burning of thousands of newspapers and the beating of staff members. The Kenyan government, considered democratic, has previously accused the Standard of inventing stories on several occasions.

Corruption has raged through the Kenyan government as of late, and the media has fostered political tension by calling into question a series of secret meetings between Kenya President Mwai Kibaki and his main opponent, former Environment Minister Kalonzo Musyoka. The article on that secret rendezvous, published Saturday, led to the detention of three Standard reporters yesterday. After divulging all they knew, and asked to reveal their sources, the journalists were instructed to wait for further instructions "from above."

Information Minister Mutahi Kagwe says he knows nothing about the raids, yet earlier in the week he had threatened government intervention if publications continue their "misreporting and misrepresentation." As he put it: "If you rattle a snake, you must be prepared to be bitten by it." The police now admit to the raid, calling it a "sweep" to gather evidence important to national security.

Why Hate Heating Assistance?

Fred Clark makes a very good point here. You'd think that pro-corporate Republicans like Joe Barton, Dick Cheney, and George Bush would be all in favor of low-income heating assistance programs, like LIHEAP, that allow poor families to buy oil to heat their homes—because ultimately that money just ends up in the pockets of Exxon and Shell executives. It's corporate welfare, only it actually does some good on the side. Republicans should be all over that, right? Guess not—Congress still refuses to fund the program at the necessary levels, despite record high heating costs this winter, forcing families to rely on Venezuela for heating oil aid. The joy of seeing people freeze to death, apparently, outweighs the joy of helping everyone's favorite oil companies out.

Also, if the GOP really wanted to lower costs for programs like LIHEAP—which, when it comes down to it, only amounts to a percent of a percentage point of the federal budget anyway—the party could support federal proposals to "weatherize" old homes, by plugging up leaks and making old homes more heat-efficient. Everyone's utility bills will be lower in the long run, and Congress could spend less on aid. Again, this too would achieve a core Republican goal—reducing spending—and do good things. But no. Too sensible, apparently.

March 1, 2006

Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

New video footage shows that Bush was briefed on the probable disaster that could result from Hurricane Katrina, including busted levees, before the storm struck. The video also shows Bush not asking a single question during his final briefing before the hurricane hit. The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, shows

in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster…

.A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. "I'm concerned about their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

Just five days later the levees had burst, and Bush stated that he didn’t think anyone had any idea that that could happen.

Predicting the Insurgency

The latest scoop by Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Stroebel has been linked around quite a bit:

U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

Okay, so Rumsfeld and the people in the White House are fools. We knew that. And however wrong our intelligence agencies may have been about various things over the years, this is yet more evidence that they were always considerably less wrong than the civilians—hacks, one might call them—in the Bush administration. We've known that too.

But here's a question that doesn't really get answered in the piece. What could Rumsfeld or anyone else have actually done if they had taken the reports seriously? Was there a window of opportunity in October 2003 when the U.S. military could have shut down the Iraqi insurgency, with a change of tactics or whatnot, if only Rumsfeld had just listened to the NIE? Or was it just that the insurgency was inevitable and unstoppable and no amount of forewarning by U.S. intelligence could have changed any of that? I certainly don't know, and it's an important question, at least for those debating whether the occupation of Iraq was a catastrophe because it was a good idea that was completely bungled in the execution (as many a disgruntled hawk now believes) or because it was a bad idea that was bound to fail from the start.

Demographics and Patriarchy

Philip Longman makes a somewhat novel argument in Foreign Policy this month. He notes that population growth rates in the industrialized world are slowing down, because families aren't having enough kids these days. Eventually populations will shrink in many countries—it's already happening in Japan. But Longman argues that, in most of these countries, what he calls "patriarchal" families will still reproduce faster than their godless liberal counterparts. So the world of the future will "disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm." More kids will come from socially conservative families, basically.

Longman thinks that this explains why America is becoming more conservative; the right-wingers are having more babies. "Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry." Well, maybe. But probably not. Even granted that conservatives tend to have more kids than liberals, that doesn't mean that the kids all stay conservative. Polls in the United States show that every generation tends to be more liberal than their parents, at least on social issues. George W. Bush may be president, but the country as a whole is far more socially liberal than it was, say, thirty or twenty years ago. (Really.) So it's not clear that demographics are necessarily going to lead to "religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family [rebirth? did it ever die?]" all around the industrialized world. But Longman's argument's worth reading all the same.

Stalemate on Darfur

When we wrote last week about Darfur, the UN was talking about taking over peacekeeping duties from the African Union there. Now top UN officials are claiming that the African Union is backing away from the plan. The Sudanese government has opposed UN involvement, and has helped fuel anti-UN sentiment around the continent, with other African leaders expressing concern that outside involvement will only cause more violence in the region.

Among other things, the UN's special envoy for Sudan, Jan Pronk, said that "there has been talk" that Sudan will become the "same situation as Iraq a couple years ago"—i.e., that an insurgency will appear to fight the intervention force, or that al-Qaeda will become more active in the region. Just days ago, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir warned that Darfur would become a graveyard for any military force entering the region without Sudan's permission.

It's questionable how long the African Union can remain effective in Darfur. A larger intervention force will be needed not only to stop the Sudanese militias that continue to carry out genocide, but also to enforce negotiations between Darfur and a president who demonstrates a lack of regard for his own citizens. Today the United States will hand the rotating Security Council presidency over to Argentina. That leaves a month before the seat goes to China, which has significant oil and trade interests in Sudan and is extremely unlikely to take any sort of lead in halting genocide there.

Under Their Thumb

Via the Guardian, the Stones sex it down.

When the [Rolling] Stones make their Chinese debut next month, they will succumb to government pressure by dropping Brown Sugar, Let's Spend the Night Together, Honky Tonk Woman and Beast of Burden from their playlist, an associate told Reuters.

The Chinese ministry of culture told the band in 2003 that these four songs -some of the most sexually explicit in the band's repertoire - were unacceptable. ...
It has been a long time coming. The British band has been in talks about playing in China since the late 1970s, when a concert was denied by a government concerned about "spiritual pollution" from western culture.

February 28, 2006

Scientists enlist cruise ships to collect oceans data

Speaking of the ocean, AP reports:

Scientists are enlisting cargo ships to measure water temperatures, ocean currents and even the height of clouds in the hope of revealing the oceans' secrets.

Peter Ortner, chief scientist with the Atlantic Ocean Marine Laboratory of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that in order to address questions such as the changing path of the Gulf Stream scientists need more than the few years of data most missions can provide.

The long-term data that commercial ships can yield is what has been historically so difficult to obtain and what the latest project hopes to achieve.

And did we mention that the current issue of Mother Jones has a special report on the fate of the oceans?

How Medicare Wastes $80 Billion a Year

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research has just put out a new, and easily readable, report arguing that the Bush administration's 2003 Medicare bill will essentially "waste" $800 billion over the next decade because it was so poorly designed. Among other things, Republicans in Congress refused to allow Medicare to use its buying power to bargain down the price of drugs—something that is down in virtually every other industrialized country around the world—which would have saved $600 billion over ten years.

Not only that, but this route would have been much simpler too—all Congress would have had to do was to establish an add-on drug benefit to the existing Medicare program. As Baker notes, the bill was deliberately structured to "ensure that multiple private insurance companies would provide the benefit rather than Medicare." It was great for those insurance companies; bad for everyone else.

It's a good paper, although I suspect Congress could wring even more savings from Medicare if it really wanted to. Baker is only comparing the current program with a more ideal program that would have Medicare run things (saving billions in administrative costs) and bargain down the price of drugs. But you could also eliminate the $86 billion in subsidies that the government is paying to prevent companies from shifting costs onto the government—a mostly ludicrous provision and "pure windfall" for many companies—as well as the $6.4 billion over the next decade to subsidize health savings accounts. A lot of that money could be used to expand the current drug benefit and still have savings left over. In fact, that's exactly what the House Democrats have been proposing all along, and it's a pretty good start.

Will the Birthing Suit Save Lives?

The invention of the birthing suit is upon us, and while it may sound silly, this Velcro contraption can save lives of at-risk women in remote locales by preventing haemorrhaging, which causes a third of the 500,000 deaths during delivery a year, can potentially be averted by this new invention.

Assembled from a mass of Velcro and tight fitting material, the reusable suit circulates blood from the legs to the vital organs, thus delivering oxygen. While it is not a permanent solution, it buys time, and according to Sullen Miller, lead researcher at the University of California, "in our research, women who appeared clinically dead, with no blood pressure and no palpable pulse, were resuscitated and kept alive for up to two days while waiting for blood transfusions." This technology could have major effect in developing countries, as the suit requires no medical training to apply, and if it allows enough time to get the appropriate care, can rescue women from deadly situations.

An Anti-Adoption Bill to Get Behind

Via Needlenose, Ohio Democrat Robert Hagan has a modest proposal:

State Sen. Robert Hagan sent out e-mails to fellow lawmakers late Wednesday night, stating that he intends to "introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents." The e-mail ended with a request for co-sponsorship.

Hagan said his legislation was written in response to a bill introduced in the Ohio House this month by state Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, that… seeks to ban children from being placed for adoption or foster care in homes where the prospective parent or a roommate is homosexual, bisexual or transgender.

To further lampoon Hood's bill, Hagan wrote in his mock proposal that "credible research" shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing "emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities."

Priceless.

Prison and Debt

The New York Times notes in an editorial today that convicted felons are often saddled with debts from state-mandated legal fees and treatment programs that they can't possibly repay when they leave prison. And very often, until they repay them, they aren't allowed to vote:

Last week, an article by The Times's Adam Liptak introduced us to a disabled woman named Beverly Dubois who lost the right to vote because she could not pay about $1,600 of charges that were assessed in connection with her marijuana conviction. The debt is growing rapidly because of the interest charged by the state. Ms. Dubois, who served nine months in jail, has paid her debt to society. But until she settles the one to the state, she is stripped of her rights as a citizen. Disabled in a car accident, she can send in only $10 per month. At that rate, she is likely to die before paying off the debt.

All that for a "marijuana conviction," already the most asinine charge on the book. Fortunately the federal government spends about $4 billion a year to make sure Ms. Dubois and other pot-smokers have their lives destroyed before they cause any "trouble."

Latest Zogby poll shows 85% of troops think they are in Iraq because of a Saddam/September 11 connection

The lastest LeMoyne College/Zogby poll, released today, is filled with interesting--and in some cases, alarming--information concerning the attitudes of U.S. troops toward the war they are fighting in Iraq. 72% of those responding to the poll said that the U.S. should leave Iraq within the next year, and about 25% said the U.S. should leave Iraq immediately. When asked why some Americans favor immediate troop withdrawal, the breakdown looked like this:

15%--Those Americans do not understand the need for our troops to be in Iraq
16%--Those Americans do not approve of the use of troops in a pre-emptive war

20$--Those Americans do not believe that the continued presence of U.S. troops will accomplish anything

37%--Those Americans are unpatriotic

58% of those serving said the Iraq mission is clear in their minds; 42% said it was somewhat unclear or very unclear to them. 85% said the U.S. is in Iraq to retaliate for Saddam Hussein's role in the September 11 attacks, and 77% said they also believe a major goal of the war is to prevent Saddam from protecting al Qaeda.

Interestingly, 93% of respondents said that the removal of weapons of mass destruction was not a reason for the military presence of the U.S. in Iraq. Also, 80% of the troops responding to the poll said that they did not have a negative view of Iraqis because of attacks by insurgents. 80% were opposed to the use of banned weapons, and 55% said that it is not appropriate to use harsh interrogation methods against insurgents.

Only 30% believe that the Department of Defense failed to provide adequate protection for them.

The survey included 934 respondents interviewed at undisclosed locations throughout Iraq

February 27, 2006

House Rules Committee releases scathing report on the selling of America

Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York, ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was on Air America Radio today to discuss the report released last week by her committee--"America For Sale--The Cost of Republican Corruption." Congresswoman Slaughter talked about Medicare, the disputed Halliburton money that has been returned to Halliburton, and the failure of contractors to provide safety for American troops in Iraq.

From the report's executive summary:

The most important thing to know about Washington these days is the following statistic: over the past ten years, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has grown from around 10,000 to more than 34,000, while the fees that lobbyists charge their new clients have increased by as much as 100 percent. Today there are 63 registered lobbyists for each member of Congress.

The success of The K Street Project, according to the report, has led to "bizarre, outrageous stories that seem more at home in the pulp paperback thrillers of John Grisham or Carl Hiaasen than in the halls of Congress."

Though the new House Majority Leader, John Boehner, was chosen because he was considered farther removed from Rep. Tom DeLay than the acting Majority Leader and presumed frontrunner, Rep. Roy Blunt, Boehner is nevertheless closely tied to K Street. For all the talk of "reform," by electing Boehner, House Republicans have made it clear that they wish to protect and prolong the current system of government by lobbyists.

"America for Sale" goes into great detail on the sale of Medicare, energy security, homeland security, national defense, public health, jobs, and higher education corporate interests. It is not a pleasant read, but it should be a required one.

Can Civil War in Iraq Be Averted?

"Analysts See the Lebanon-ization of Iraq in Crystal Ball," reports the Los Angeles Times. And USA Today peeks in the cupboard of possible things the U.S. could do to stave off a real civil war in Iraq—and finds it pretty much bare. The news today that Sunnis have agreed to join the political process again seems like a good development, but that doesn't mean reconciliation is in hand: according to the UN's outgoing human rights chief in Iraq, John Pace, even before the Samarra bombing, Shiite and Kurdish-backed death squads were torturing and executing hundreds of Iraqis every month in Baghdad alone.

Sunni leaders appear to be rattled by the violence in recent days enough to want to negotiate with the Iraqi government, but as Israelis and Palestinians have known for years, it only takes a few people who don't actually want peace for there not to be peace. The more militant Iraqi clerics such as Muqtada al-Sadr are gaining in influence by the day, drowning out saner and more moderate religious voices. Under the circumstances, it's no surprise that more and more analysts here in the United States are talking about withdrawal; because Iraq may continue to disintegrate regardless of whether the U.S. stays or goes. And in that case, as Suzanne Nossel says: "The only thing worse than Iraq as a failed state is Iraq as a failed state with 130,000 Americans living there."

Krugman on Inequality

We've argued before against the notion that income inequality in America is simply due to the fact that some "lucky" set of workers has the skills and education to flourish in the "new" economy while another, less fortunate, set just doesn't. Now Paul Krugman argues along similar lines today:

The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

Even well-educated workers haven't necessarily been doing well in the "new" economy. But there has been economic growth over the past few decades. Lots of it. So who's receiving all the benefits? A "small oligarchy":

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?", gives the details.
Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

The idea that this inequality can be fixed by improving education in America is simply wrong. For the past 30-odd years, the upper classes—the "small oligarchy" in Krugman's phrase—have been waging a conscious war against equality. Thomas Edsall's excellent 1985 book, The New Politics of Equality, chronicled this trend 20 years ago, halfway into the Reagan administration: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena."

In 1976, the top 1 percent in America had "only" 20 percent of the wealth, a sharp drop from 35 percent in the 1960s. Inflation was threatening to throw the rentier class down off the mountain. (Real wages, meanwhile, reached historic highs in those "bad old days.") But then the counterattack that Edsall describes occurred, and after ten years of "joint, cooperative action"—first the Volcker recession in 1979 (urged on by Wall Street), and then Reagan's attacks on organized labor, corporate regulation, and the welfare state—the "small oligarchy" had 40 percent of the wealth again. And now we're safely at the point were liberals are accused of "class warfare" whenever they suggest that maybe the Bush tax cuts are a bit excessive. It's a good racket.