january 2005

BUSH WILL PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY - INSECURITY LOOMS
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS SEATTLE POST
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/205166_thomas26.html

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is proposing to erode the Social Security system by privatizing part of it, making Wall Street the big winner of a huge financial windfall. Bush wants workers to earmark 2 percent of their Social Security payroll taxes for individual private investment accounts -- a move that would undermine funding for the 69-year-old program that was designed to provide retirees with a secure income.

The emphasis in Social Security should be on "security." Bush's plan to rely
on the stock market undermines that value.

> Bush has been fixated on Social Security since he first took office and has been determined to chip away at the government role. His re-election and the Republican majority in Congress have galvanized him into action. Republicans have tried to scare young people by telling them that their Social Security checks won't be there when they become eligible to collect benefits.
>
> Now Bush is falsely proclaiming that there is a financial "crisis" in Social Security. If he repeats that often enough, he may convince people that the program is on the rocks -- just as he successfully led the nation into war under the fallacy that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.
>
> Social Security will be solvent until 2042, though analysts say that more will be paid out in benefits than collected in payroll taxes, starting in 2018. In 1983, when the program had a short-term financial problem, former President Reagan tapped Alan Greenspan, now chairman of the Federal Reserve System, to head a commission to propose a fix. The Greenspan panel made recommendations to bolster the program, including a gradual increase on the payroll tax on employees and employers that went up to 7.65 percent in 1990.
>
> It seems Bush is obsessed with wiping out the last vestige of the New Deal era -- a safety net that provides a guaranteed monthly government check for the elderly, the disabled, widows and orphans and other dependent children. He has offered no new blueprint to transform Social Security except to lay down the law that there will be no payroll tax increases and there will be no change in benefits for those now receiving them. Those preconditions appear designed to improve the marketing of his proposed overhaul of the retirement system.
>
> Analysts estimate it will take $2 trillion in transition costs to privatize the system over 10 years. The administration reportedly is sounding out Wall Street on the impact of borrowing some $2 trillion from the movers and shakers in the bond markets. And what will that do to the ballooning budget deficit?

The Great Depression and the 1929 stock market crash prompted Franklin D. Roosevelt to lay the groundwork for the Social Security program to alleviate the poverty of senior citizens at the time. The law was proposed in 1935 and enacted in 1936. The system works. More than 99 percent of the Social Security revenues from tax collections go to pay benefits. Less than 1 percent is devoted to overhead expenses. Anyone who remembers the 1929 Wall Street debacle knows that it would be risky business to divert our Social Security payroll taxes to play the market. There have many other market collapses since. The dot-com implosion changed the retirement plans of millions of Americans. More recently, it would be well to "think Enron."

Bush promoted privatization at his so-called two-day White House Economic Conference last week -- a misnomer if there ever was one since nearly all the attendees were cheerleading CEOs. Labor representatives were conspicuously among the uninvited. White House press secretary Scott McClellan explained that Bush wanted to hear from the people who were "pro-growth."

Social Security is often referred to as the "third rail" in politics because it is reputed to be dangerous for lawmakers to touch it. Bush may be able to talk his party into supporting privatization, but there will be huge resistance in Congress. Some concerned organizations are banding together to fight any change. Among them are AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons,) the
>AFL-CIO, the National Organization of Women and others. Previous presidents -- more in touch with workers -- upheld the Social Security system when it was threatened and made changes that always kept it intact.

Roosevelt said it was "a law that takes care of human needs." When enacted, the law was evidence that the United States will keep the promises to the elderly and disadvantaged it made in troubled times. Bush should be stopped from breaking those promises.


Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail:
helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2004 Hearst Newspapers.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Enemies Among Us

by Mike Whitney

12/20/04 "Progressive Trail" -- The new Intelligence reform bill is a more stunning attack on the Bill of Rights than the Patriot Act. Most people have no idea how dramatically their "inalienable" rights have been savaged, or to what extent the Congress has sold them out. It's no exaggeration to say that the foundation of personal liberty, guaranteed in the law, is cracking at the base. It'll be a miracle if we can put it back together in time to pass it on to our children. 

As usual, the role of the media has been pivotal in obfuscating the details of the bill. They've fed the hysteria over the establishment of a NID; (National Intelligence Director) a glamour position that has been represented as vital to stopping another 9-11. What rubbish. Teaching Condi Rice how to read a simple e-mail from bin Laden would be twice as effective. 

The media has done little to expose the real nature of the conflict between the Pentagon and the 9-11 panel. That battle was a straightforward "turf war" that threatened to take a chunk of money away from Rumsfeld, who presently gets 80% of the Intelligence budget. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) defended Rumsfeld by claiming that "battlefield operations" would be endangered if the bill passed. It was nonsensical argument reflective of Hunter's indebtedness to the Defense industry (Dig around the internet and you'll find that Hunter is even more of a corporate streetwalker than most of his peers) As for Rumsfeld, he just wants his $32 billion, so that he can persist in bankrolling his clandestine detention centers, death squads and propaganda facilities (now called strategic intelligence). In reality, Rumsfeld is conducting his own secret government, and has been for some time. That takes money, and lots of it. 

The creation of the NID is an appalling idea. It puts all 14 intelligence agencies UNDER A POLITICAL APPOINTEE, which is an invitation for disaster. We all know how corrupted information was before the Iraq war; imagine what it will look like after it travels through the executive sausage-making unit. It's unlikely that anything remotely resembling the truth will ever emerge from the Bush White House. 

The new bill creates a new national ID card ("Let me see your papers") by federalizing driver's licenses. The plan is to establish federal guidelines in the design of licenses that can be used as a means for tracking people. These standards are unnecessary unless the government is developing a social strategy that is so heinous that it's bound to generate more enemies. The increased repression and the greater disparity in personal wealth suggest that this is the case. 

Democracy Now elaborates on the new national ID: "There's all sorts of new technologies that could be incorporated into the driver's license to link it to all sorts of public and private-sector databases. And you could also imagine putting an RFID chip in the license that would allow it to be tracked remotely. So, this is something the 9/11 commission had actually recommended be done, that the driver's license should be something like an internal passport of the sort that we've seen in the Soviet Union in the past, and although the Congress wasn't willing to explicitly go that far, they have laid the groundwork for that kind of checkpoint society in the future." 

Did you hear any complaints from Congress over this hallmark of fascist's regimes? 

The Intel bill also creates a "Civil Liberties Board" charged with 
investigating whether the new legislation adversely affects civil rights. 

Regrettably, the board is a complete sham. It has no subpoena power and is subordinate to the NID, the President and the Attorney General. In other words, it's merely a public relations ploy intended to conceal the bill's harsher measures (Undoubtedly, this "Board" will be used by Bush to defend his steadfast concern for civil liberties) 

The powers of the FISA court have also been seriously expanded. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act basically allows the secret court to overturn the "probable cause" provision of the 4th Amendment in the investigation of terror suspects. John Ashcroft gravely abused the statute by extending it to the surveillance of identity-theft suspects and drug traffickers (Ashcroft actually boasted to Congress about the success of using the Patriot Act to apprehend criminals who were entirely unrelated to terrorism. He obviously considered the 4th Amendment nothing more than an unnecessary nuisance) Now the law has been expanded to include a "lone wolf" provision; supposedly aimed at an individual terrorist acting without the support of a foreign government. In fact, the purpose of the new provision is to allow unlimited surveillance of any American without the hassle of having to prove even the "remotest" connection to organized terror or a foreign government. It is a "blank check" for law enforcement to eschew all privacy laws without fear of reprimand. It is the end of the 4th amendment. 

More importantly, if someone is arrested (as was the case with 1200 Muslims after 9-11) as a terrorist suspect, he can be refused bail and IMPRISONED INDEFINITLY WITHOUT CHARGES. The moniker of "terrorist" trumps the underlying principle of American jurisprudence, that is, the "presumption of innocence" Now, prisoners will have to prove that they aren't guilty; a difficult prospect when there is no process in place to challenge the terms of their detention. Consider the comments of Judge Antonin Scalia in this regard: "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive." 

This sounds like empty rhetoric coming from Scalia, but his point is a valid one. Where arbitrary imprisonment begins, the rule of law ends. American citizens are no longer protected by "inalienable rights"; their safety depends on the discretion of the President. 

This brief summary doesn't cover all the repressive elements of the new bill. It does, however, show how personal liberty is being sacrificed to enhance the power of the state. The Intelligence Reform legislation is 615 pages long. Not one was written by either a Senator or a Congressman. This entire campaign to strip Americans of their civil liberties is being orchestrated by private interests; the "silent partners" who wrote this legislation in its entirety. Think about that. 

The document that will be signed into law next week is a frontal assault on the fundamental rights of man. Even Habeas Corpus, which goes back 600 years in English law, is struck down. 

The enemies of freedom are among us, and they're moving quickly. But, don't take my word for it. Consider the meaning of these attacks on basic rights and make your own judgment. 

Copyright: Progressive Trail

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

weapons in the Age of Nuclear War
By Amy Worthington www.globalresearch.ca

From DL

Radioactive weaponry, declared both illegal and immoral by the entire civilized world, has been used by the Pentagon in Desert Storm, the Balkans campaign and the on-going occupation-wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Few Americans understand the extent of carnage inflicted in their name across the planet.

By scientific definition, the missiles, tank penetrators and bunker busting bombs unleashed against Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. and British forces in the so-called war on terror are nuclear weapons.19 Refuse from radioactive weaponry does not disperse, but remains in the atmosphere organotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic to all living flesh for 4.5 billion years.

Inhabitants of the Pentagon's two newly "liberated" nations are now slowly dying of radiation and heavy metal poisoning. Victims of U.S. weaponry used in Afghanistan have a concentration of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their bodies never before seen in civilian populations.20 Tons of depleted and non-depleted uranium contaminating their land, air, food and water guarantee their painful demise. Using data from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), nuclear scientist Leuren Moret calculates that the estimated 2,500+ tons of depleted uranium used against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 is sufficient to cause 25 million new cancers.21 Is it a coincidence that the population of Iraq, according to the CIA, is 25 million?

The quarter million U.S. and British fighting forces who have helped the Pentagon deliver this holocaust also face inevitable radiological death by slow burn. Rotated into atomic war zones since 2001, coalition troops have inhaled and ingested millions of tiny invisible ceramic uranium particles which emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation as they embed in lungs, kidneys, blood, lymph and bone.22 Radiation exposure to a single internalized U-238 (uranium) alpha particle is 50 times the allowable whole body dose for one year under international standards.23 As U-238 decays into daughter isotopes, it becomes ever more radioactive, causing cell and organ destruction to escalate over time.24 Uranium contamination leads to incapacitating, multi-organ system disorders identical to illnesses suffered by thousands of Gulf War I vets. Bodily fluids poisoned with uranium isotopes sicken spouses and visit upon offspring a genetic Armageddon.25

Who knows what a disabled and prematurely dying military population will mean to future stability and safety of USA? Yet Senator Chuck Hagel (R- Neb.) now demands that America provide more fodder for its atomic battlefields by reinstating the military draft so that "all of our citizens...bear some responsibility and pay some price" in order to "understand the intensity of the challenges we face."26

Despite disingenuous denials that biological harm will result from atomic warfare,27 the Pentagon knows full well the gruesome realities of uranium weaponry by virtue of its own voluminous studies spanning 60 years. Pentagon documents confirm that America's war establishment knowingly exposes its own troops to dangerous levels of radiation.28 The resulting illness of those now returning from the war zones is already making headlines.29

Because our military-industrial overlords brazenly poison the very grunts who make their war games possible, we must logically conclude there is virtually nothing they would not secretly and sadistically do to the rest of us. Military officials lie as perniciously about chemtrail operations30 as they do about effects of DU weaponry. If people were to consider the published science regarding chemtrails and DU, they would understand that we are all in mortal jeopardy.

Both the Pentagon's aerosol operations and its limited nuclear wars are deeply interconnected. We can trace the beginnings of Operation Cloverleaf right to the Strangelove brain of Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and proponent of nuking inhabited coast lines to rearrange them for economic projects.31 Before he died in 2003, Teller was director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where plans for nuclear, biological and directed energy weapons are crafted. In 1997, Teller publicly outlined his proposal to use aircraft to scatter in the stratosphere millions of tons of electrically-conductive metallic materials, ostensibly to reduce global warming.32

Shortly after Teller's presentation, the public began seeing frenetic chemtrailing. In 2000, CBS News admitted that scientists were "looking at drastic solutions for global warming, including manipulating the atmosphere on a massive scale." CBS confirmed that the plan to load the air with tiny particles would "deflect enough sunlight to trigger global cooling."33

Teller estimated that commercial aircraft could be used to spew these particles at a cost of 33 cents a pound.34 This gives credence to a report by an airline manager, forced by a compulsory non-disclosure agreement to remain anonymous, that commercial aircraft have been co-opted to assist the military in consummating Project Cloverleaf.35 A 1991 Hughes aircraft patent confirms that sunscreen particulate materials can be run through jet engines.36 A science textbook now used in some public schools discusses the sunscreen project by showing a large orange-red jet with the caption, "Jet engines running on richer fuel would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen." The logo on the plane says "Particle Air."37 The implications of this crucial information should not be understated. A program to make America's millions of annual jet flights a source of specially designed particulate pollution is serious business

Voting errors tallied nationwide
The Boston Globe, Excerpt.
By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff  December 1, 2004

More than 4,000 votes vanished without a trace into a computer's overloaded memory in one North Carolina county, and about a hundred paper ballots were thrown out by mistake in another. In Texas, a county needed help from a laboratory in Canada to unlock the memory of a touch-screen machine and unearth five dozen votes.

In other places, machine undercounting or overcounting of votes was a problem. Several thousand votes were mistakenly double-counted in North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, and Washington state. Some votes in other areas were at first credited to the wrong candidates, with one Indiana county, by some quirk, misallocating several hundred votes for Democrats to Libertarians. In Florida, some machines temporarily indicated votes intended for challenger John F. Kerry were for President Bush, and vice versa.

In the month since the election, serious instances of voting machine problems or human errors in ballot counts have been documented in at least a dozen states, each involving from scores of ballots to as many as 12,000 votes, as in a North Carolina county. On Election Day, or in later reconciling tallies of ballots and voters, local officials discovered problems and corrected final counts. In some cases, the changes altered the outcomes of local races. But in North Carolina, the problems were so serious that the state may hold a rare second vote, redoing a contest for state agriculture commissioner decided by fewer votes than the number of ballots lost.

After the disputed vote in Florida four years ago, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and authorized $4 billion so states could create central computerized voter lists and replace outdated voting systems such as punchcards by 2006. But many states have not completed the overhaul, and this year's election unearthed enough problems -- both with older technologies and newer electronic touch-screens -- that two federal agencies plan unprecedented nationwide inquiries. The investigations by the Government Accountability Office and US Election Assistance Commission will begin early next year and be completed by mid-2005, at the earliest.

In addition, minor presidential candidates requested recounts in four states -- a partial one completed yesterday in New Hampshire, and statewide in Ohio, New Mexico, and Nevada.

None of the recounts or inquiries is expected to affect the results of the presidential election, which Bush won by more than 3.3 million votes.

Those who believe that either or both of the past two presidential elections were manipulated by a vague conspiracy to elect Bush have done statistical analyses of voting patterns in Florida and argued that the voting discrepancies were much larger and systemic, but their studies have not stood up to scrutiny from academics and other analysts.

Most of the concerns, which have rocketed through the Internet, center on computerized voting or tabulating machines, including some that do not keep a paper record for audits and recounts. Some computer scientists acknowledge that these systems could be vulnerable to tampering.

''I would hesitate to take seriously the conspiracy theories, but there are certainly gaps and vulnerabilities that have got to be addressed," said DeForest B. Soaries, chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, which was created by the 2002 law and plans to conduct hearings around the country on the voting.

''We are convinced that while the election went relatively smoothly compared to what many had expected, that does not eliminate the need to study the results and collect data to document machine malfunctions and other administrative matters," Soaries said.

Since 2000, watchdog groups have intensified their monitoring and cataloging of complaints and errors. The nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation and other groups built a database of more than 30,000 ''election incidents" reported across the country this year. Most were routine, but nearly 900 involved significant e-voting problems, including malfunctions that shut down machines, lengthening waits at the polls. There were 42 reports of total breakdowns of machines in New Orleans and 28 in Philadelphia and ''15 reports of catastrophic machine failure" in Mercer County, Pa.

The most serious problems occurred in North Carolina, where 4,438 e-votes disappeared in Carteret County. In at least five other counties, major double-counting or undercounting was discovered and corrected by North Carolina officials during their tabulations.

Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, attributed many mistakes to ''the human element, brought on by fatigue." In Carteret, for example, election workers apparently did not notice the ''Voter Log Full" message on the black box as the UniLect touch-screen failed to record the electronic votes, she said.

''If we had problems in the past, they were not magnified like this," McLean said, referring not only to the closeness of the statewide race, but also the extraordinary scrutiny of voting since 2000.