BEFORE
BUSH INVITED FEINSTEIN TO GORGE ON THE HALLIBURTON – CARLYLE – BUSH – SAUDIS
WAR PROFITS, SHE MOUTHED OFF ON AWFUL WAR PROFITEERS. BUSH KNEW HE FACED
IMPEACHMENT, AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN TRIED FOR WAR CRIMES FOR THE SECOND WAR WAGES
AGAINST IRAQ BY THE BUSH FAMILY TO PROTECT THEIR CRONIES, THE 9-11 INVADING
SAUDIS’ BORDERS. BUSH ALSO KNEW THERE WAS NO U.S. SENATOR MORE CORRUPT OR
EASILY BOUGHT THAN DIANNE FEINSTEIN. WITH FEINSTEIN COULD BE BOUGHT TO VOTE
DOWN ANY SENATE EFFORT TO IMPEACH BUSH (REMEMBER BUSH’S CRAP ON WEAPONS OF MASS
DESTRUCTION?). WITH FEINSTEIN’S VOTE, ALSO CAME BOXER’S, WHO HAS TAKEN HUGE
BRIBES FROM FEINSTEIN’S PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD C. BLUM.
AS
SOON AS FEINSTEIN’S HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM WAS RAKING IN THE WAR PROFITS,
FEINSTEIN SENT LETTERS TO CONCERN CONSTITUENTS DECLARING SHE WOULD NOT PUSH FOR
IMPEACHMENT. THEN SHE WENT OUR AND BOUGHT YET ANOTHER MANSION, HER $16 MILLION
WAR PROFITEERING PLACE IN S.F.
“Congress closes a
gaping hole in the law against war profiteering, companies ripping off
taxpayers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may never be fully prosecuted. This
is because the latest conflicts are not declared wars.”
Eight Years of Madoffs- The
OBAMA WAR MACHINE - WHO BENEFITS? FEINSTEIN! MUSLIM DICTATORS! OBAMA'S FRIENDS
THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS!
SEN.
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, AND HER LAP BITCH BARBARA BOXER, HAVE VOTED FOR ANY AND ALL
WARS FOR MUSLIM DICTATORS, WHILE THEY DEMAND THAT OUR OWN BORDERS BE LEFT OPEN
AND UNDEFENDED AGAINST NARCOMEX.
KEEP
YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT MY WAR PROFITEERING WHORE WIFE’S MANSIONS! HERE’S A BRIBE
TO DO SO!
“Since
the 2000 election cycle, Blum has contributed over $75,000 to the Democratic
Senatorial Committee, and thousands more to individual Democrats, including
John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Joe Lieberman, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer.”
March
1, 2006 The Democrats' Daddy Warbucks
Feinstein family war profits, part II
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum,
could well be called the Democrats' Daddy Warbucks. He's scored bundles from
war contracts. He has recently purchased a $16.5 million crib in San Francisco
and along with his wife has handed hundreds of thousands of dollars over to
fellow Democrats.
Since the 2000 election cycle, Blum has contributed over $75,000 to the
Democratic Senatorial Committee, and thousands more to individual Democrats,
including John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Joe Lieberman, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara
Boxer. Richard Blum's history as an entrepreneur began at the ripe age of 23
when he began to work for the San Francisco brokerage firm Sutro & Company.
Blum quickly climbed the ranks and became a partner by the age of 30. According
the San Francisco Chronicle, "Blum proved that he had an eye for
fixer-upper properties when he led a partnership that acquired the struggling
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for $8 million – then sold it to
Mattel Inc. four years later for $40 million." In 1975, Blum went out on
his own and formed a brokerage agency. Today, Blum's lofty firm, Blum Capital,
holds positions in more than 20 companies, including real estate giants, credit
bureaus, and yes, even military contractors. Blum sees himself as an altruistic
capitalist, claims one of his ex-employees: "He likes to go after companies
that are down and out, and bring their stock back to life. He thinks he's doing
good." Blum shares a large stake in Perini, a civil construction company
that is happily employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not all of Blum's war
profits come from Perini. In 1975, his venture capital firm went after fledging
construction and design company URS when the business was about to be bought
out by another corporation. Since then, Blum has increased his stock in URS,
capitalizing on its recent military contracts. Unlike Blum's dabbling with
Barnum & Bailey, his current profits aren't so safe for child consumption.
Here are the basics to date: Blum currently holds over 111,000 shares of stock
in URS Corporation, which is now one of the top defense contractors in the United
States. Blum is an acting director of URS, which bought EG&G, a leading
provider of technical services and management to the U.S. military, from The
Carlyle Group in 2002. Carlyle's trusty advisers, past and present, include
former President George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and ex-SEC Commissioner Arthur
Levitt, among other prominent neoconservatives and Washington power brokers.
URS and Blum have since banked on the Iraq war, scoring a phat $600 million
contract through EG&G. As a result, URS has seen its stock price more than
triple since the war began in March 2003. Blum has cashed in over $2 million on
this venture alone and another $100 million for his investment firm. "As
part of EG&G's sale price," reports the San Francisco Chronicle,
"Carlyle acquired a 21.74 percent stake in URS – second only to the 23.7
percent of shares controlled by Blum Capital." The Carlyle Group has long
been accused of exploiting its political connections to turn a profit. And if
Carlyle can come under the microscope for its government ties and war
profiteering, as it did in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, than surely Blum's
URS ought to be subject to the same scrutiny. Owen Blicksilver, Blum's
spokesman, claims his boss and Sen. Feinstein have never talked shop at home in
their gated mansion: "Mr. Blum and Sen. Feinstein have never had any
discussions about outsourcing, government contracts, or URS." If this were
a Republican senator's spouse scoring bundles off the spoils of war and passing
it along to fellow Republicans, the liberals would be up in arms. But since
Dianne Feinstein is a leading Democrat, mum's the word. Partisanship trumps
ethics. The Byrne Report Hawk Tale By Peter Byrne ON JAN. 18, California
senator Dianne Feinstein introduced Dr. Condoleezza Rice at a Senate nomination
hearing for Secretary of State in terms so saccharine that molasses seemed to
ooze out of her mouth. She was a precocious child, Feinstein purred. She has
skill, judgment and poise. She loves football. Bush loves her. "The
problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice's past performance
is any indication, though, we can rest easy." That very same day,
Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, took advantage of a spike in the price of
his URS Corporation stock. He sold a third of his holdings in the defense
contractor for $57 million, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission. With Rice confirmed, the business of death and occupation
looks rosy as hell for Feinstein, who--let's get real--benefits tremendously
from sharing community property with Blum. URS' largest customer is the U.S.
Army, which accounted for 17 percent ($587 million) of its cash revenue in
2004. In 2001, URS enjoyed a mere $169 million in defense contracts. Now, its
war contracts total more than $2 billion. According to its annual report, the
San FranciscoĆbased URS anticipates that profits will rocket up in 2005,
because "operations in the Middle East are expected to generate increased
work related to the development of weapons systems, the training of military
pilots and the maintenance, upgrade and repair of military vehicles."
Provided, of course, that our hawkish leadership remains as poised and lovable
as the new Secretary of State. Feinstein, who sits on the Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee, is an advocate of first-strike warfare, even though it flouts
international law and the standards of common decency. Interestingly, her
Financial Disclosure Report for 2003 was more than three times the size of her
2002 disclosure (Feinstein's 2003 disclosure numbers 133 pages, compared to
Sen. Barbara Boxer's six-page report). The Feinstein-Blum portfolio is crammed
with multimillion dollar investments in the military-industrial-financial
complex and corporations that heavily exploit Third World peoples. The senator
has a lot to lose should the neoconservative war machine falter. Hubby holds a
controlling interest in another engineering firm, Perini Corporation of
Framingham, Mass. Perini ranks No. 6 by dollar amount in war-related government
contracts in the Middle East. According to its annual report, "Perini
proudly supports the U.S. government with global rapid response capabilities
for defense, reconstruction and security." Perini builds military
facilities and roads in Afghanistan, electrical infrastructure in Iraq and U.S.
embassies around the world. After the Senate, Feinstein included, approved
Bush's war plans in 2002, Perini's defense contract awards soared from
negligible to $2.52 billion. But, as with many of the sole-source, open-ended
contracts awarded to politically connected firms, there are problems with
accountability. Last summer, Department of Defense auditors determined that
Perini could not adequately justify its costs in Iraq as fair and reasonable.
That's government-speak for: They're gouging the #!$% out of us. Perini is
heavily engaged in military and municipal public works projects inside the
United States; at least two are also under investigation for contract fraud.
For example, the city of San Francisco has sued general contractor
Perini--which was in a joint venture with the Tutor-Saliba construction
firm--for $100 million in cost overruns at a San Francisco International
Airport project. The lawsuit alleges that the joint venture engaged in "a
sophisticated pattern of fraud," including inflating costs, fabricating
delays and setting up minority front companies to exploit affirmative-action
preferences. The attorney general of Massachusetts is looking into alleged
false claims made by a Perini joint venture in the "Big Dig" urban
highway construction boondoggle in Boston. Ron Tutor, owner of Tutor-Saliba and
CEO of Perini, bought into the latter company, along with Blum, as it teetered
on the edge of solvency in the mid- 1990s due to a bad real estate investment.
It rebounded, thanks to the firm's sudden ability to obtain lucrative U.S.
military and government contracts, which, of course, had nothing to do with the
fact that Blum's powerful wife has her hands on the military's purse strings.
Remarkably, Perini grossed $1.37 billion in 2003, up 27 percent from the
previous year, before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Perini
attributes its rocketing profits to "increased volume of work in Iraq and
Afghanistan." As a risk factor, the firm notes that continued demand for
its military services depends upon "the political situation in Iraq,"
which, logically, means that it desires the bloody war and useless occupation
to continue indefinitely--a wish that hawktails with the foreign policy
positions of Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Feinstein. I almost forgot: Perini Corp. is the nation's most
active builder of Indian-fronted casinos. That explains a few things about Sen.
Feinstein and the politics of gambling, soon to be revealed in greater detail
in this space.
*
WAR PROFITEER DIANNE
FEINSTEIN
Codifying Riches Above Honor
J.G. Schwam - November
2, 2003
The GOP will stop at nothing to
prevent its crony capitalist partners from getting as rich as possible. As the
allegations of over payments and price gouging by US government contractors
operating in Iraq surfaces, there sits an entire party in the capital that took
direct action to codify their desire to look the other instead of decrying
potential frauds against the American taxpayer.
Today the office of Senator Patrick
Leahy (D-VT) distributed a press release
that points out that, despite the repeated efforts of its member Democrats the
Senate Appropriations Committee refused to allow the insertion of a provision
putting the teeth of Federal prosecution against those would seek to profiteer
from their Iraqi War and reconstruction contracts into the bill authorizing
Bush’s $87 billon Iraq war appropriations request.
Leahy said; "We
are about to spend a lot of money in Iraq, quickly and with few real controls
on how it is spent," said Feinstein.
FEINSTEIN QUOTE:
“THE LEAST WE CAN DO IS PREVENT
PRIVATE COMPANIES FROM TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, ITS PEOPLE,
AND THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE RISKING THEIR LIVES EVERY DAY TO MAKE IRAQ, AND
THE WORLD A BETTER, SAFER PLACE TO LIVE.”
GUESS THIS DIDN’T APPLY TO HER
HUSBAND, WHITE COLLAR CORPORATE CRIMINAL, RICHARD C. BLUM.
"The least we can do is prevent private
companies from taking advantage of the American Government, its people, and the
men and women who are risking their lives every day to make Iraq, and the
world, a better, safer place to live. It was a mistake to strip the
anti-profiteering provision from the conference report, and restoring it
through this bill would send a clear signal that this kind of activity will not
be tolerated."
The amendment cosponsored by Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) would create new laws making it a federal crime
to engage in war profiteering or overcharge taxpayers for any good or service
with the specific intent to excessively profit from the war or reconstruction
efforts in Iraq. The bill would also prohibit perpetrating fraud or making
false statements in any form involving a contract or the provisioning of goods
or services in Iraq.
WE CAN’T SAVE OUR NATION UNLESS
WE REMOVE CALIFORNIA’S ELECTED WHORES.... EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM
*
IS BUSH ANYTHING BUT
BUSH’S THIRD TERM ON STEROIDS?
Obama begins bid for second term: A president of war and social
reaction
By Patrick Martin
5 April 2011
5 April 2011
US
President Barack Obama announced his candidacy for reelection in 2012 in a
video statement posted on the Internet Monday and delivered via e-mail. He
became the first candidate to formally declare for the 2012 presidential
election, filing papers with the Federal Election Commission, a legal
requirement to begin campaign fundraising.
Obama has
already been dubbed the“billion-dollar candidate,” since his campaign is
expected to be the first in US history to raise and spend that enormous sum.
The number is appropriate and symbolic, given that the Obama presidency has
served the billionaires at the expense of American working people.
The
financial aristocracy—and Wall Street in particular—backed Obama heavily over
Republican John McCain in 2008, as he raked in a record $779 million in
contributions, more than double the previous record set by George W. Bush in
2004. Despite claims that this fundraising edge was due to a surge in small
donations, the majority of both Obama’s primary campaign and general election
funding came from those able to contribute $1,000 or more.
High
rollers will be called upon to do even more in the 2012 campaign. At a meeting
last month, campaign manager Jim Messina asked 450 top “bundlers” to raise
$350,000 apiece in 2011—the year before the election—double what they were
asked to raise for the whole 2008 campaign. This effort alone would give Obama
a war chest of more than $150 million going into January 2012, far more than
any of his potential rivals in either big business party. In accumulating such
vast sums of money so quickly, the administration is seeking to preclude any
possibility of a challenge to the pro-corporate policies that both political
parties uphold.
In an
address to a group of well-heeled supporters last week, Obama declared, “We
have delivered on change that we can believe in. But we aren’t finished. We’ve
got more work to do.”
In fact,
all of the administration’s policies represent a continuation and deepening of
the rightwing policies of the Bush administration. The Obama administration
expanded the bailout of Wall Street begun under the Bush administration,
devoting the full resources of the federal treasury to rescuing the banks and
safeguarding the accumulated wealth of the financial elite.
Two-and-a-half
years later, corporate profitability has been restored, reaching the highest
level ever, $1.68 trillion, in 2010, up 36.8 percent in a single year. Profits
have increased 61.5 percent from the low point in the 2008 financial crisis
that triggered the ongoing economic slump.
The stock
market has rebounded, with prices up 70 percent from the low point in
2008-2009, and a whopping $1 trillion added to stock values in 2010 alone. CEO
pay is back to the stratospheric levels that prevailed before the crash, up 50
percent from 2009 to 2010, while pay levels for average workers have stagnated.
For the
working class, there has been no recovery. Instead, the Obama administration
has spearheaded a drive by corporate America to make the working class pay for
the financial crisis and bailout, through the destruction of seven million
jobs, the slashing of pay and benefits, and an unprecedented attack on public
services and social programs.
At a
campaign-style rally at a UPS facility Friday, Obama hailed the official
jobless figures released that day, which showed a drop of a full percentage
point in the unemployment rate over the past four months, from 9.8 percent to
8.8 percent. “The last time that happened,” Obama boasted, “was during the
recovery in 1984.”
However,
analysis of the Labor Department figures establishes that the decline in the
official unemployment rate is due not to unemployed workers being hired, but to
discouraged workers leaving the work force in despair over the lack of jobs.
Corporate
economic forecasters now project—based on the optimistic assumption that the US
economy will not slide back into recession under the impact of financial
crisis, war and budget cutting—that the official unemployment rate in November
2012 will be 8 percent or more, the highest level on an election day since
World War II.
The slump
of 2008 to the present has created an entire class of long-term, more or less
permanently unemployed. Six million Americans have been out of work for six months
or longer, not counting the additional millions who have dropped out of the
labor force, and the average duration of unemployment for a newly laid-off
worker is 39 weeks.
The big
business politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties are seeking to
add to the social misery by cutting or eliminating the benefits that are all
that stand between tens of millions of working people and complete destitution.
Millions of low-paid workers will get a tax increase this year while the Bush
tax cuts for the wealthy were extended for two years with Obama’s blessing.
State and
local governments have slashed 400,000 jobs over the past two years, and are
now engaged in the biggest attacks on jobs, social benefits and workers’ rights
since the Great Depression. Wisconsin has provided the most publicized example,
but Democratic governors as well as Republican are engaged in slashing wages
and benefits for public employees, cutting or eliminating Medicaid benefits and
other state services.
These
state cuts will be dwarfed by the impact of the coming attack on federally
funded social programs. The down payment will come in the cuts in current
federal spending, some $30 to $60 billion, which the Obama administration and
Congress are expected to finalize this week.
Today the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives will unveil its proposed budget
for 2012, which will set the stage for a staggering $4 trillion reduction in
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the lifeblood for tens of
millions of elderly and poor working people.
In this,
they are only following the trail blazed by Obama in his so-called healthcare
“reform,” whose goal was not to make medical care a basic right for all
Americans, but to cut the cost of providing healthcare, for both the federal
government and corporate America.
These
cuts are promoted with phony claims that “there is no money” for jobs, wages,
education, healthcare and housing, by the very same politicians who lavish
trillions on the Pentagon and on tax breaks for the corporations and the
wealthy.
In the
run-up to his reelection announcement, Obama has punctuated his pledges to cut
federal spending and the deficit by firing hundreds of cruise missiles at
Libya, while continuing the open-ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have
killed a million people and squandered trillions of dollars.
The White
House and the Democratic Party engaged in a series of populist pretenses as
part of the kickoff of the Obama reelection campaign.
Despite
the huge financial advantage and ruling class support, there is an undercurrent
of nervousness, even trepidation in the Obama camp. This is not because of any
concern over the Republican opposition, since Obama has embraced the same
policy framework.
But there
are increasing signs of popular distrust of both parties and growing opposition
to the entire structure of corporate-controlled politics. A Gallup poll
released in February found that support for the Democratic Party has fallen in
every state, and particularly in the belt of industrial states from
Pennsylvania through Minnesota, where the slump has hit hardest. Support has
fallen for the Republican Party as well, and for Congress, in the wake of the
Republican takeover of the House last fall. In a poll taken just after the
start of the war in Libya, Obama’s job rating fell to 42 percent, the lowest of
his presidency.
More
significant than declining poll numbers is the evidence of increasing militancy
and social anger in the working class. The struggle that exploded in Wisconsin
in February and March serves as a warning of much broader social conflicts that
are on the agenda.
The
driving force of these social conflicts—and the central fact of American life,
albeit largely unacknowledged in the political system—is the unprecedented
growth of social inequality. A layer of the super-rich is heaping up untold
wealth, while the vast majority of the population struggle to survive from day
to day. From Obama to the Tea Party, all factions of the American political
establishment defend the capitalist system, which continually generates and
deepens this inequality.
Economist
Joseph Stiglitz writes about the impact of social inequality in a revealing
commentary in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine, headlined, “Of
the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”
He cites
well-established facts about the economic polarization in America—the top one
percent take 25 percent of national income and control 40 percent of its
wealth; their incomes rose 18 percent over the past decade, while the incomes
of the vast majority of the population fell.
He notes
the impact of this polarization on social policy and on political life:
“The more
divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy
become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on
government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can
buy all these things for themselves…
“Virtually
all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of
the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1
percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be
rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key
executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the
top 1 percent.”
A liberal
who fears the consequences of such a top-heavy society, Stiglitz is warning the
ruling class not to push the population too far. He writes:
“In
recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to
protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies
they inhabit… As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question
to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our
own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.”
Such a
revolutionary upheaval is increasingly inevitable in America. The critical
challenge is to develop the leadership and perspective required to establish
the political independence of the working class from both the Democratic and
Republican parties, and build a mass movement for socialist policies.
This is
the basis for the conferences on “The Fight for Socialism Today”that the Socialist Equality Party, the International Students for
Social Equality and the World Socialist Web Site are holding this month,
beginning this coming weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
These
conferences will discuss a socialist program to secure the basic social rights
of the working class, oppose imperialist war, and halt the assault on
democratic rights. We urge all of our readers and all those looking for a
perspective to fight the attacks on working people and youth to make plans to
attend.
January 11, 2009
Op-Ed
Columnist
Eight Years of Madoffs - The OBAMA WAR MACHINE -
WHO BENEFITS? FEINSTEIN! MUSLIM DICTATORS! OBAMA'S FRIENDS THE 9-11 INVADING
SAUDIS!
By FRANK RICH
THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the
revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged
to American taxpayers. That was our collective
contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction
— a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that
epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.
The source for this news
was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of
this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no
less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme
concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady
dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.
The report quotes no less
an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell
said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security
forces —the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have
100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing
numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the
Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.
What’s most remarkable
about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971,
The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal
history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But
after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered
half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.
After all, next to
big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, GuantƔnamo and the
politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the
wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners”
would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to
other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion
in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax
havens to the far-from-transparentdisposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In
the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in
terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm
from public officials.
Not even a good
old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy
one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found
that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships
with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing
oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event
sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be
put up by the oil company.
Back in the day, an
oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and
earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents.
But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also
encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and
gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night
comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grĆ¢ce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from
taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).
It took 110 pages for the
Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile
the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal
government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many
unanswered questions.
Just a short list is
staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa”into the crucial prewar
State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush
speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and
then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall?
Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?
And, for extra credit,
whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas
Air National Guard?
The biggest question
hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the
past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how
will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck
crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed
us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have
been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack
Obama said. “I
would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of
Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many
problems we’ve got to solve.”
WHILE WAXMAN HAS
PRETENDED TO GO AFTER HALLIBURTON, THE BIGGEST GLOBAL CRIME WAVE EVER, HE’S
NEVER OBTAINED EVEN ONE INDICTMENT AND HAS KEPT HIS BIG MOUTH SHUT ABOUT DIANNE
FEINSTEIN’S LONG HISTORY OF CORRUPTION, WAR PROFITEERING, AND SELL OUT FOR RED
CHINA BUCKS.
Henry Waxman, the
California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush
scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains
outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the
administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress
pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any
prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the
historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic
Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”
We could certainly do worse
than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the
Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation
commissions, war crimes trialsand, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments
yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.
This is the same office
where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying
torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles
for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the
public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not
respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”
The last is not a
rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address
the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be
merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress
must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity;
every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by
the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its
electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist
Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands
for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims
that openness will empower terrorists.”
As if to anticipate the
current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move
on,”because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.”
She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the
aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture
and“extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of
the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic
domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic
meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and
legislative branches alike.
As the financial historian
Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last
week, we
could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the
history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The
terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and
their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing
and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure
meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigationsover whether he enriched
himself and friends with government contracts.
The tentative and amorphous
$800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last
week sounds
like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must
help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled
up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated
by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s
Magazine.
If Bernie Madoff, at least,
can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can
those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where
all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may
be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New
Deal.
*
July
3, 2008
Editorial
The
Imprecise Meaning of War
Unless Congress closes a gaping hole in the
law against war profiteering, companies ripping off taxpayers in the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars may never be fully prosecuted. This is because the latest
conflicts are not declared wars.
The
anti-fraud law dating to World War II allows prosecution of contractors up to
three years after a war ends. But this statute of limitations was omitted from
the resolutions authorizing military force in Iraq and Afghanistan, which
carried no formal war declaration.
Investigators
say that current war fraud runs into untold billions, including faulty
ammunition and vehicles and not-so-bullet-proof vests. Investigative officials
and the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction have testified that they’re
hampered by the ongoing conflicts and need more time to catch contract thieves
after they end.
The
solution is a bipartisan bill clarifying that “war”absolutely includes
Congressional authorizations of military force. The repair also wisely allows
prosecution for five years after a war. The Senate Judiciary Committee just
approved this crucial measure and the rest of Congress should quickly enact it.
Or else the loophole will continue to invite war contracting as “a free-for-all
with no criminal accountability,” in the words of Senator Charles Grassley, the
bill’s Republican sponsor.
The
Justice Department, meanwhile, is reportedly sitting on a backlog of more than
900 cases in which whistle-blowers have accused government contractors of
billions in fraud, in both military and domestic spending. Long delays bog down
the information in secrecy as the department, understaffed and overloaded,
weighs whether the allegations have merit, according to The Washington Post.
On
both the war front and the home front, the government must do a far more
convincing job of going after profiteers who are gouging the taxpayers.
No comments:
Post a Comment