MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: June 18, 2006

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June 24, 2006

Overthrow the Minimum-Wage Earners!

Ted Kennedy's proposal to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over three years, offered in the form of an amendment to the defense authorization bill, failed in the Senate last week; no surprise there, alas, though only in the U.S. Senate do you lose even when you win a majority (the measure would have needed 60 votes to pass, but garnered only 52). It was, you see, a vote against oppression: This is "a classic debate between two different philosophies,’’
said Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican. "One philosophy believes in the marketplace, the competitive system…and entrepreneurship. And secondly is the argument that says that government knows better, and the top down mandate works.’’

June 23, 2006

The Haditha Soundtrack

A lot of ink can, and will, be spilled on what makes young men blow childrens' brains out in a war that doesn't make sense. But a song is worth a thousand words, and there's no more chilling (if unintentional) soundtrack to the news from Iraq these days than a song by a Marine that has lots of defenders on conservative websites.

Now it's worth remembering that there's a long tradition of this kind of thing-there was a song in Vietnam called Napalm Sticks to Kids--and of course it's more metaphor than description; horror breeds its own kind of self-caricature. But what makes it work, what makes the Hadji Girl audience chuckle and guffaw, is how close the horror of caricature is to the horror of reality.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

June 22, 2006

The Cost of Superfund Neglect

The 8000 residents living in the town of Glen Avon, California, are lucky; they get to live right next to a 17-acre toxic waste dump:

[The Stringfellow site] served as a hazardous waste disposal facility from 1956-1972, accepting over 34 million gallons of waste from metal refinishing, electroplating and pesticide manufacturing companies. This waste was dumped into surface evaporation ponds. Rainfall caused the ponds to overflow, sending streams of heavily polluted water into nearby neighborhoods. The population of the census tract around the site is 52 percent minority and has a median household income of $43,000.

And no one's cleaning it up. Then there are the 6,491 residents of Montgomery County, Ohio, who live near North Sanitary Landfill. Decades ago, engineers decided that the best way to dispose of liquid industrial waste was to pour it on top of ordinary household garbage, thinking that the garbage would soak up the liquid like a sponge and hold it in place. But then they realized that the landfills started leaking all that toxic liquid, and instead of keeping it in place, the garbage—which covered hundreds of acres—just spread it around:

[T]he 102-acre North Sanitary Landfill sits atop an aquifer used for drinking water, which is composed of highly transmissive sands and gravel. Portions of the site have caught fire several times. It is located in a census tract with a median household income of $25,000.

Again, no one's cleaning it up. Those sites are two of the thousands of toxic waste facilities on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL), created by Congress in 1980—a short while after Love Canal, a town built atop a toxic waste dump, was discovered by the media. Polluters responsible for sites on the NPL were required to clean up their messes or face steep penalties, and a government-run "Trust Fund," financed by taxes on the heaviest-polluting industrial sectors, was set up to pay for cleanup at sites where the companies responsible couldn't do so.

Since then, of course, Republicans have gutted the Superfund program. In 1995, Congress allowed Superfund taxes—which generated $1.5 billion a year (2 percent of the profits earned by the top six oil and petrochemical companies alone in 2005)—to expire, at the behest of industry lobbyists. Under George W. Bush, the EPA has not only abandoned the principle of forcing polluters to pay to clean up "orphan sites," but it has slowed the pace of cleanups. The number of completed Superfund cleanups fell abruptly, by 50 percent, starting in 2001. Lots and lots of toxic waste sites have been neglected.

That's all been reported before. But now the Center for American Progress has recently come out with a 182-page report describing, in gory detail, the 50 worst NPL sites that have been neglected due to the gutting of Superfund. The above descriptions come from that report. Between 200,000 and 800,000 people live within a mile of these toxic sites, and are exposed to chemicals in the air and soil. Perhaps needless to say, those people are disproportionately low-income and minority. When people talk about "environmental racism," this is what they have in mind.

Most glaring of all, many of the sites have languished on the NPL even though a responsible party has already been named—often a viable, profitable businesses that could certainly afford to clean up its mess. For instance, a 75-acre toxic waste site in Bergen, NJ, where 4.5 million gallons of liquid waste were dumped in unlined lagoons, is owned by Honeywell, which made $1.2 billion in profits last year. But nothing has happened because the EPA under Bush won't enforce a cleanup.

Now, as I understand it, the main argument against Superfund is that many companies are already cleaning up their messes—70 percent according to the Bush administration—and shouldn't have to contribute to the Trust Fund that pays for cleaning up "orphan sites." This seems weak to me. It makes perfect sense that industries that have benefited by and large from cheap disposal practices over the years should pay to clean up "orphan sites." Who else should pay for it?

And it's also worth noting that many of these companies are "voluntarily" cleaning up their toxic waste only because of the threat of litigation by the EPA, which charges responsible parties triple if the agency has to clean up the mess itself. And those litigation threats are in turn financed by… the Superfund Trust Fund. If there was no Superfund, you wouldn't see nearly as much "voluntary" cleanup. Anyway, the cost of neglect has been extraordinarily high, and though it's a bit dry, the CAP report does the best job I've seen of laying that out.

Group of Republicans stalls renewal of Voting Rights Act

A spokesperson for House Speaker Dennis Hastert says that the Republican leadership "is committed to passing the Voting Rights Act legislation as soon as possible."

Maybe not. Today, just as the vote to renew the Voting Rights Act was about to take place, some members of the Republican Party met behind closed doors and decided to stall the vote. Their reason? That some of the requirements of the act were no longer relevant to key southern states that historically have tried to prevent African Americans from voting. Two Congressmen from Georgia, Lynn Westmoreland and Jack Kingston, led the movement to delay the vote, and they were joined by 78 other Republicans.

Westmoreland's and Kingston's objection to renewing the act as is was that it requires federal approval for everything. "If you move a polling place from the Baptist church to the Methodist church, you've got to go through the Justice Department," Kingston said. Speaking before Congress, Westmoreland raved about hearing complaints of discrimination from someone "whose brother-in-law told him the wrong polling place."

The Voting Rights Act outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests, but many believe that the Justice Department's approval of picture ID requirements by some states, including Georgia, amount to the same kind of discrimination because a fee is charged for the ID if the voter does not already have a driver's license. Indeed, a federal judge fouind the Georgia law unconstitutional

Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said a bipartisan commission found evidence of recent voting-rights violations in Georgia, Texas and several other states. There is also ample evidence that African American voters were intimidated by Republican operatives in the 2000 Florida presidential election and the 2004 Ohio presidential election.

Steve King, a Congressman from Iowa, objected to renewing the act as is because of its requirement that ballots be printed in languages other than English.

Will the real 20th hijacker...

If, as AlQaeda claims, Fawaz al-Nashmi, a Qaeda operative killed in 2004 in Saudi Arabia was the 20th 9/11 hijacker, slated to join the team that took over Flight 93, what happens to Mohammad al-Kahtani, the prisoner at Guantanamo who the Bush administration has been insisting is the 20th hijacker (whenever it’s not insisting that Zacharias Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker)? Al-Khatani was the subject of a March 3 Time expose, and the log of his interrogation, if you haven't seen it yet, is an absolute must-read.

Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, a staff attorney at CCR, met with the prisoner in December 2005 and in January of this year. She tells Time that in her meetings with him, Khatani "painfully described how he could not endure the months of isolation, torture, and abuse, during which he was nearly killed, before making false statements to please his interrogators." Al-Khatani, who has not been charged with anything, has withdrawn his statements, and Gutierrez has gone to federal court in the District of Columbia to demand that the government either release or charge him.

The interrogation transcript details conditions so severe, al-Khatani at one point had to be rushed to the hospital, according to CCR, which adds that “the Deputy Assistant F.B.I Director for Counterterrorism described Mr. al-Qahtani's state as `evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma.'“

Here is a brief excerpt from an interrogation on December 16, 2002:

0315: White noise. He was offered a drink of water and he refused.
0400: P/E down. Showed detainee banana rats [sic] standard of life vs his standard of life in his wooden booth. Compared his life in a wooden booth to the life he could have with his brothers in Cuba .
0430: Detainee was walked for 10 minutes. Detainee refused water. 0450: Detainee listened to white noise.
0530: Detainee required to sit and watch as interrogator and linguist played checkers. Laughed and mocked detainee throughout game. White noise present in background.

Edwards Pledges to End Poverty

Check out Ezra Klein's firsthand account of John Edwards' speech today, in which the former Senator vowed to make a major, major dent in poverty in the United States and put forward a number of quite serious ideas to accomplish that goal. I assume Edwards will be running for president in 2008, and even if he's not a serious contender, it's nice to see at least one Democrat thinking very seriously about these issues.

Gun-Owners Afraid of UN "Conspiracy"

This would all be quite humorous—

Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4—U.S. Independence Day—are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

—except for the fact that the NRA tends, quite often, to stoke and inflame conservative fears that the UN really is plotting to erect some sinister world government or other that will take away all our guns. And the fact that the NRA then uses those fears to generate backing for its opposition to sensible regulations on the global light-arms trade, which is one of the major health crises of our time. And people die as a result. So I don't know how "funny" I find it that we have a lot of gun-toting morons in this country.

Is North Korea Really Ready to Launch?

I've refrained from commenting on this North Korea ICBM business, partly because I'm not exactly an expert on missile technology, but also because most of the information seems to be coming from the always-alarmist Japanese press and the New York Times, both of which are about as illuminating as Tarot cards. So it's hard to know if it's even true that North Korea is about to launch a missile that can reach California. Let's see what better-informed people are saying. Here's Noah Schactman:

The hype kicked into high gear when the New York Times claimed that the Norks "completed fueling a long-range ballistic missile" over the weekend. But the report is getting fishier by the second. The Norks generally rely on a highly corrosive gasoline-kerosene mix for their missile fuel, and an oxidizer containing nitric acid. It's nasty, metal-eating stuff. And once fueled up, the missile has to be launched quickly -- two or three days, I've been told -- or else the missile is basically ruined.

It's now been four days. And there's been no launch. Which means it's becoming increasingly unlikely that a missile has been fueled.

Schachtman also notes that North Korea has a history of staging elaborate hoaxes of this sort in order to strengthen its bargaining position. That doesn't clarify what's going on, exactly, but it's very much worth noting. And Joseph Cirincione of Carnegie, an expert on these matters, says that even if the North Koreans were going to fire off a missile that could theoretically reach the United States, they've botched so many missile tests that it's not even clear that this one would be successful.

But that's not enough to stop the panic. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry writes in the Washington Post today that we should conduct a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, although it should go without saying that this is a terrible idea if North Korea's not, you know, actually preparing to launch missiles of any sort. The United States has "activated" its nascent missile defense system, which has proved a complete flop thus far. Jeffrey Lewis of ArmsControlWonk says any attempt to stop a Korean ICBM would almost certainly fail, and suffice to say that a failure on this front would make the Bush administration look utterly ridiculous. (Of course, if this is all just hype, and no missile is ever fired, then at least the "crisis" will garner good press for people who want to waste more money on missile defense—and maybe that's the point.)

Meanwhile, in a little-noticed statement, Pyongyang has apparently announced a "strategic decision" to give up its nuclear weapons—possibly the first time the North Koreans have ever used such language. Obviously that doesn't mean Kim Jong Il has suddenly decided to become nice and cuddly, but it does sound like there's an opening for diplomacy to work, and that seems more promising than panicking over a missile launch that may not even take place. We'll see, I suppose.

UPDATE: William Arkin also makes a convincing case that this North Korea business is wildly overblown. South Korea also appears to distrust U.S. reporting on this matter.

June 21, 2006

The book banners are at it again

The ACLU has asked a federal judge to stop the Miami-Dade County school district from removing some children's books from its libraries. The books include Vamos a Cuba and A Visit to Cuba, and were removed because school officials say they contain inaccuracies about life in a Communist country. Both the county schools chief and two advisory committees recommended that the books stay on the shelves, but the county board voted to remove them.

Vamos a Cuba contains pictures of smiling children wearing Communist youth group uniforms and celebrating the revolution of 1959.

What is interesting is that one can be fairly certain that the Miami-Dade district has never tried to remove from the schools the hundreds of history textbooks that are riddled with inaccuracies and distortions about our own history and culture.

How the Mentally Ill Are Treated

Since there isn't enough to be horrified about these days, read this St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation into the abuses taking place in Missouri's mental institutions. Thousands of "mentally retarded and mentally ill people… have been sexually assaulted, beaten, injured and left to die by abusive and neglectful caregivers." The public tends not to find out about this stuff thanks to "secrecy laws, shoddy investigations and ambivalent police and prosecutors." Every year, meanwhile, state officials promise to "do better." Here's what doing better entails:

In 2002, a privately run home in Bolivar let a man's bed sores rot his flesh so badly that he died. Two years earlier, state workers repeatedly and severely beat mentally retarded boys in Marshall…

One mentally retarded man [in a facility near Overland] prone to swallowing things died in November after swallowing an ink pen. The resident, Michael Pallme, was supposed to be watched constantly.

Another patient, Rudy Wallace, died in March from burns so severe his skin began falling off after a worker left him in scalding water.

But those incidents are only a fraction of what has occurred inside the state and private facilities that house more than 11,000 state residents who have the most severe cases of mental retardation, developmental disabilities and mental illness.

Now in a country where pundits will applaud one presidential candidate for flying back to Arkansas to execute a functionally-retarded criminal and where another president orders the torture of a mentally-disturbed prisoner so as not to "lose face", maybe this won't come as a surprise, but it should still be intolerable.

Some very cursory searching on Google and Nexis didn't bring up any similar stories about mental institutions in other states, but I'm probably looking in the wrong place. The largest "institutions" in the country nowadays are prisons, which house some 300,000 people with mental disorders, and tend to have poor mental-health services and plenty of abuse to go around. In 2003, Human Rights Watch did a report on prisoners with mental illnesses:

In the most extreme cases, conditions are truly horrific: mentally ill prisoners locked in segregation with no treatment at all; confined in filthy and beastly hot cells; left for days covered in feces they have smeared over their bodies; taunted, abused, or ignored by prison staff; given so little water during summer heat waves that they drink from their toilet bowls…. Suicidal prisoners are left naked and unattended for days on end in barren, cold observation cells. Poorly trained correctional officers have accidentally asphyxiated mentally ill prisoners whom they were trying to restrain.

It doesn't even take "the most extreme cases" to see things are bad. From people who have worked closely on this issue, I've heard plenty of stories of, say, prisoners who simply won't be "officially" classified as mentally ill despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, and will then get written up by guards at the first outburst of strange behavior (say, compulsive masturbating in their cell), leading to a longer prison sentence. Is this likely to make things a) better or b) worse? Yeah, I wonder too.

A summary of the HRW report is here. Among other things, HRW notes that until this country gets serious about the community mental health systems that were supposed to replace mental hospitals after "deinstitutionalization" in the 1960s, prisons will continue to serve as mental institutions of last resort. I'd like to know what effects the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, passed by Congress in 2004, has had but perhaps it's too early to tell. It also appears that the "war on drugs," the gift that keeps on giving, has disproportionately affected the mentally ill as the prison population continues to expand and expand without end.

NYC to Bush: Drop Dead!

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly lambasted the Bush administration’s plan to cut terrorism funding to New York and Washington by more than 40 percent this morning in a hearing before Long Island Congressman Peter King’s House Committee on Homeland Security. King, himself a conservative Republican, has been furious with the administration over department’s plan to reduce New York City’s antiterrorist funds to $124.4 million in 2006, down from $207.5 million a year ago. “It was indefensible, it was disgraceful, and it raises very real questions about the competency of this department," he said in the hearing.

The process of applying for antiterror funding “should not be a contest to see who could write the best term paper for their college class,” argued Bloomberg. The administration, however, has called New York’s antiterror program “ineffective”, and has argued that the city doesn’t have any national monuments or icons worth protecting.

In the same hearing, New York congresswoman Nita Lowey pointed out that while New York was responding to warnings of a planned cyanide attack on its subways, Columbus, Ohio was buying bulletproof vests for its police dogs.

It’s worth remembering that on 9/11 itself, the administration was severely lacking in its ability to so much as communicate with New York and Washington. The President on Air Force One had no telephone contact with D.C. for much of the day; the military was not informed of the hijackings until it was too late to act; and neither the airlines nor the FAA told New York city officials about the attacks in progress until the planes hit the buildings, even though they had blow-by-blow accounts from flight attendants 10 minutes after the hijackings began—early enough to begin getting people out of the second World Trade Center Tower. There's little indication matters have improved much since then.

In the wake of 9/11, Bush fought to prevent an investigation of the attacks, and tried his best to keep information from a congressional inquiry under wraps. Having used the attacks as justification for the war in Iraq, the president now seems ready to dump New York and move on to places where Republicans must attend to their electoral base. Here, (via CBS), are a few of the places that will be getting more antiterrorism money under the administration’s plan:

Jacksonville, Fla. 2005 funds: $6.8 million. 2006 funds: $9.2 million. Increase: 26%. Major landmark: Alltel Stadium, home of Jacksonville Jaguars.
St. Louis; 2005 funds: $7 million. 2006 funds: $9.2 million. Increase: 23.6%. Major landmark: Gateway Arch.
Louisville, Ky.; 2005 funds: $5 million. 2006 funds: $8.5 million. Increase: 41.2%. Major landmark: Churchill Downs race track.
Omaha 2005 funds: $5.1 million. 2006 funds: $8.3 million. Increase: 38.2%. Major landmark: Offutt Air Force Base.

Will Democrats Roll Over for Timber Companies?

Some big companies are boosting their share of campaign contributions to Democrats this year, a sign that executives may be starting to hedge their political bets after a decade of supporting congressional Republicans.

The Wall Street Journal ran that little item a few days ago. Corporations are filling up the donkey coffers. That's good for the Democrats, who get more money to run their little campaigns, which probably makes a difference at the margins.

But it's not nearly as sweet for everyone else, seeing as how corporate-owned Democrats tend to be the worst sort of Democrats. Exhibit A is this New York Times story today about how a few Democrats might give up their opposition to estate tax repeal—which is currently stalled in the Senate—in exchange for tax breaks for the timber industry. None of the Senators have wavered yet, but Dems on the payroll of Big Timber at risk of reversing their stances include Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

No Immigration Bill for Now

On one level, it seems like unabashed good news that the House has decided to put off negotiating any sort of immigration bill with the Senate until after the fall elections. After all, the betting line is that, even if the Democrats don't retake the House and the Senate, there will at least be more Democrats in Congress, which will likely make it harder for the GOP to pass a draconian immigration bill with walls along the border and mass deportations and the like.

But I can't honestly say I'm looking forward to a summer of "public hearings" on immigration from the House, which will likely consist of bashing the Senate's bill and trumpeting the House Republicans' own, more stringent bill. What are the odds that this won't degenerate into a babble of anti-immigrant demagoguery? Oh, right, zero.

June 20, 2006

More ways to wreck whale ears

Let's see. Most of the world has agreed to protect whales from extinction; whales rely on sound waves to navigate, communicate, in short, survive; so what we'll do is shoot "air guns" (sounds so innocuous, right?) into the ocean whose deafening sound can be heard from the California coast clear to the other end of the Pacific? This makes sense in whose world? The answer in a second; meanwhile, check out whale expert Dick Russell's piece in Mother Jones special oceans coverage on another sound source that has been causing whales to beach themselves en masse, some with their brains literally scrambled. Now--ready? The air guns (which are bad for squid, too) are "critical in the search for tomorrow's oil and gas resources," according to Exxon Mobil.

Press Secretary does Snow job on Imus

It doesn't take much to get Don Imus to endorse all manner of lies and distortions. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow found it was pretty easy on June 14 when he stated that George W. Bush had never linked Saddam Hussein with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Snow quoted Bush as saying "there's no demonstrated link between Saddam [Hussein] and 9-11, and we're never going to make that argument." Of course, Bush did make that link. For example, he made it in his letter of March 21, 2003 to the Speaker of the House and the President Pre Tempre of the Senate. Dick Cheney made the same link on two different appearances on Meet the Press, and the September 11 Commission reported that as early as September 12, 2001, Bush asked his staff to explore links between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of the day before. Bush's insistence that such a link be made is documented by former U.S. Treasurer Paul O'Neill in Ron Suskind's The Price Of Loyalty, and by former national security specialist Richard A. Clarke in Against All Enemies.

New Budget Rules Are a Disaster

Fair warning: we're about to wade into some murky budget-related territory here, but these are important issues, so let's go. The House Budget Committee just approved a bill to give the president the line-item veto, which would allow Bush to strip out any piece of a spending bill he didn't like.

I happen to think this is a truly terrible idea, and you can read all about it here and here. The measure is being hyped as a way to let the president control "pork-barrel" spending, but in all likelihood, it will end up being used as a weapon for political retaliation—the president will get the power to nix spending projects in districts of representatives he wants to screw over. A man who orders that mentally disturbed prisoners be tortured so that he can "save face" surely doesn't deserve more power. We can all agree on that. Anyway, it gets worse…

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire is unveiling a "budget overhaul plan" which would set "hard deficit targets and requiring off-the-board cuts if they are not met." That sounds innocuous, and it's being hyped as a way of controlling the out-of-control federal deficit and implementing "fiscal responsibility." Congress needs to be "saved from itself" and all of that. (For the record, my proposal would begin by asking the administration not to piddle away $30 billion on Boeing tankers they don't even need, but set that aside.)

Anyway, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities examines the details of Gregg's plan, and it's awful. Truly, truly awful. So awful that it's hard to know where to begin. The proposal would impose caps on discretionary funding that would lead to steep cuts in social services. It would rejigger definitions of "solvency" that would basically force Congress to slash federal funding for Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. Medicare premiums, meanwhile, would shoot up dramatically for seniors. Defense spending, on the other hand, would be shielded from all cuts, despite the fact that we waste billions each year on fancy weapons systems we don't even need in order to fight enemies that don't even exist.

Under the Gregg proposal, it would also be much, much easier for Congress to eliminate federal programs willy-nilly and screw with Social Security (currently the Senate needs 60 votes to do so; under the new changes it would need only 51). Needless to say, this would be seriously catastrophic. So catastrophic that I feel like using capital letters and exclamation marks to write this post. But I won't.

The worst part about the whole thing is that tax cuts would be exempt from "fiscal discipline" rules. Under the old PAYGO rules during the 1990s, if Congress wanted to cut taxes it would have to pay for them with corresponding spending cuts, ensuring that it couldn't do what has been done under the Bush administration—namely, pass frivolous tax cuts for the wealthy by borrowing money that will just have to be repaid in the future. Gregg's proposal doesn't have this requirement. So even under the new rules, Congress could still create a massive deficit by cutting taxes left and right. This stuff is arcane, true, but it's hard to think of a more important priority for Democrats right now than to kill this proposal.

Torture Is Depraved and Ineffective, Part 2,397

Apparently, Ron Suskind's new book reports that the CIA tortured a mentally disturbed man who knew very little about al-Qaeda all so that the president didn't have to "lose face." Lucky for us, while under torture, Abu Zubaydah confessed to all manner of plots and schemes in every corner of the country and had law enforcement running around the country on various wild goose chases. Draw your own lessons from this little story.

Can't We Just Have a Moment of Silence?

This is awful. And doesn't it seem... unseemly somehow to jump on the deaths as instant debate fodder?

Back to "It's The Economy, Stupid?"

Democrats in Congress seem to be running for cover in the face of a GOP rebound on the war, but a recent minimum-wage amendment introduced by Ted Kennedy could be the wedge issue they need for the upcoming election. The amendment, introduced June 19, would raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997, from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. "A minimum wage worker who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earns just $10,700 a year," Kennedy said in a floor statement. "That's $6,000 below the poverty line for a family of three."

A recent Labor Department report shows that inflation is erasing wage increases. Weekly wages dropped 0.7 percent in real terms in May. In 50 percent of the 65 months since Bush took office, workers' pay either has remained unchanged or declined, Bloomberg reports. "People at the high end of the income scale are doing a lot better than people in the middle or low end, but there are a lot more people in the middle and low end,'' Douglas Lee, president of Economics From Washington, a Potomac, Maryland, consulting firm, told Bloomberg. "For those people, inflation is eating into their income gains.'' An AP poll of 1000 or so people in early June found 60 percent disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy, while 38 percent approved.

It's possible that Democrats could, as they did during the 2002 midterms, try to focus on the economy and refuse to make Iraq an election issue. Even though the civil war in Iraq is intensifying, Bush's PR performance after the killing of Zarqawi has brought the president a rebound of sorts—at least with the media. Meanwhile, Dems may rant and rave about Iraq, but they can't agree on what to do about it. Four Democratic senators—Jack Reed, Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein and Ken Salazar, with support from Hillary Clinton, Pat Leahy, and Minority Leader Harry Reid—have introduced a non-binding "sense of the Senate" resolution asking Bush to begin a phased redeployment out of Iraq by the end of this year. But the measure doesn't say how fast the drawdown should go.

An alternative measure, sponsored by Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer and John Kerry would order the President to withdraw troops by July 1, 2007. But a similar withdrawal measure flopped last week on a 93-6 vote in the Senate—and the House has passed a nonbinding resolution rejecting a date for withdrawing the troops on a 256-153 vote, with large numbers of Democrats joining the GOP votes in favor of indeterminate commitment to the war.

Refusing to Abandon Roe

Most people have heard the argument from various "contrarian" liberals that overturning Roe v. Wade would actually be a boon for abortion rights—not to mention the Democratic party—because it wouldn't make much of a difference anyway and it would rouse pro-choicers from their apathetic slumber. Examples are here and here. It's totally false, of course, but it's still an insidious idea that seems to have some staying power among well-to-do male pundits living in blue states. So I'm glad Scott Lemieux took the time to shred the argument in this American Prospect article.

But the other thing to note—and Scott sort of gets at this in his piece—is that Roe v. Wade is somewhat beside the point here. Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad Roe exists, and even seem to be one of the few people convinced it was correct as a legal decision. But barring John Paul Stevens dying or some similar catastrophe (and I'm not much for praying, but I could be persuaded to light a candle for Stevens), the Supreme Court isn't likely to overturn Roe anytime soon.

Instead, as Helena Silverstein and Wayne Fishman point out here, a Court with Anthony Kennedy as its swing justice is just going to chip away at abortion rights, bit by bit. And while that won't be nearly as disastrous from a pro-choice standpoint as overturning Roe would be, it will still be pretty damn disastrous. The court will start upholding more and more state and federal restrictions, supported by "centrists," that will a) make it harder for women to get first-trimester abortions by putting in place "waiting periods" and the like and b) restrict the very late-term abortions that are being necessitated by the first group of regulations.

So the real battle, then, will be at the state level. And that's what made this piece, by Allison Stevens, so intriguing. Stevens notes that pro-choice groups are much, much less organized at the state level than pro-life groups. NARAL has chapters in only 29 states, compared to 50 for the National Right to Life Committee. And the pro-choice state groups largely tend to fight defensive battles rather than fighting an "incrementalist counterattack" by introducing "initiatives of their own that could preserve, or even improve, access to abortion." Nationwide, states have enacted 194 major restrictions on abortion compared to only 39 major laws protecting access.

Ramesh Ponnuru has long gloated about how effective the pro-life "incrementalist" strategy has been at the state level, and he has a point. Stevens has a good example: ridiculously stringent laws (known as TRAPs) that regulate abortion providers, from the size of the parking lot to the width of the hallways, have been extremely effective at shutting clinics across the country down by driving up costs. (The regulations are, of course, totally unnecessary: abortion is already an extremely safe medical procedure—much safer than actually giving birth, for instance.)

But it's stealthy enough that it doesn't incur much of a backlash. So I can somewhat understand the rationale behind the argument that only the death of Roe will wake people up to what's going on here and spur pro-choice groups into fighting back at the state level. As Scott shows that that's exactly wrong. But I'm also not sure what can reverse the pro-life "incrementalist" attack, apart from a major strategy shift among state-level groups—which Stevens recommends—and a more liberal Supreme Court that actually strengthens abortion rights rather than simply preserving the status quo.

Rumsfeld's "Poor Memory"

So back in April of last year, two investigators from the Pentagon's inspector general paid Donald Rumsfeld a little visit to ask him about "the largest defense procurement scandal in recent decades." Nothing major, just a few questions here and there. The usual. Here's how the interview went, according to the Washington Post:

Rumsfeld cited poor memory, loose office procedures, and a general distraction with "the wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan to explain why he was unsure how his department came to nearly squander $30 billion leasing several hundred new tanker aircraft that its own experts had decided were not needed…

[A] copy of the transcript [of the Rumsfeld interview], obtained recently by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act after a year-long wait, says a lot about how little of Rumsfeld's attention has been focused on weapons-buying—a function that consumes nearly a fifth of the $410 billion defense budget, exclusive of expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yeah, what's a few billion dollars anyway? Lucky for us we have a "CEO President" at the helm to make sure everything's running smoothly…

June 19, 2006

Halliburton contracts up by 600%

A document compiled at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman of California, confirms that federal contracts are now the fastest growing component of federal discretionary spending. The Government Accountability Office and the Defense Contract Audit Agency were two of the agencies whose 500 reports, audits and investigations were used to compile the report.

Procurement spending increased by 86% between 2000 and 2005, meaning that it has increased more than twice as fast as other federal discretionary spending. According to Waxman, overcharging--in terms of both error and fraud--has occurred frequently. 118 contracts worth $745.5 billion have been found to include waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.

Last year alone, Lockheed Martin received contracts worth more than the combined budgets of the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Congress. But the big winner, to no one's surprise, was Halliburton, whose contracts increased 600% from 2000 to 2005.

In 2004, Department of Defense Inspector General's auditors were removed from Iraq, so as of the end of 2005, $140 billion worth of spending was not being monitored. You may recall that Halliburton lost $9 billion, which has yet to be accounted for.

Homeland Security's Revolving Door

On Sunday, Eric Lipton of the New York Times had an astonishing story about the legions of Homeland Security officials who were leaving their jobs to work as lobbyists for companies selling technology to DHS. Now technically, there are rules about what officials can and can't do:

The law that governs the so-called post-employment life for federal officials was enacted in 1962. It prohibits senior officials from "any communication to or appearance" before their former government department or agency on behalf of another for one year from the date they leave their job. There is also a lifetime ban on communicating with anyone at the department in connection with "a particular matter" in which the former official "participated personally and substantially."

A separate law prohibits certain former federal employees, like program managers or contracting officers, from accepting a job with a company they supervised for a year afterward if a contract involved exceeded $10 million.

But as one would expect, there are all sorts of loopholes here. Michael J. Petrucelli, who was formerly acting director of citizenship and immigration services, apparently left his job and was hired within months as a lobbyist for GridPoint, which was trying to sell power-supply devices to the Coast Guard. Since the Coast Guard is technically a different department of DHS, Petrucelli was allowed to take the job. Another official—Tom Blank, the former number 2 at the Transportation Security Administration—seems to have skirted around ethics regulations simply by declining to sign official documents.

At this point, it's hard to believe that the Department of Homeland Security has accomplished much besides transfer billions of dollars to private corporations. Back in 2002, Brendan Koerner wrote a piece for this magazine on the corporations lining up outside DHS with their arms outstretched for "the biggest government bonanza since the Cold War." In itself, that's not a bad thing—so long as all these contracts are going to good use. But if contracts are being handed out on the basis of convenient connections and legalized graft, how likely is that? (Here's a partial answer.)

MORE: Justin Rood says that Lipton probably took some major risks in publishing this story—namely, he'll likely have a hard time finding sources among former DHS officials from here on out. Kudos to Lipton for writing the story anyway.

"It's a very sad day for whales."

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