There are only 19 days to go until the national referendum on the COMPETENCE, CREDIBILITY and CHARACTER of the _resident, the VICE _resident and the US regimestream news media. At least six more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges Reich. Sen. John F. Kerry won another debate last night. Final score: Kerry-Edwards 4-0, Bush-Cheney 0-4. However, the _resident, as ridiculous as he came off, did not turn in the worst performance of the night...That DIStinction belonged to debate *moderator* Bob Schieffer, the _resident's golf buddy, who did not ask one question about stem cell research (Christopher Reeves' death should have elicited one), nor did he ask one question about Enron in particular or about Energy or Corporate Governance in general, nor did he ask one question about the just released US Civil Rights Commission report blasting the Bush abomination, nor INCREDIBLY did he ask even one question about the Environment, or campaign finance reform, or Fraudida or the shocking stories of Democratic voter registration forms being torned up and throw away in Nevada, Oregon and elsewhere...Schieffer did, however, make sure he gave the _resident the opportunity to push every Neo-Confederacy hot button for his withering base (i.e. abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, etc.) It was a shameful display...Nevertheless, the juggernaut of national redemption continues to gather momentum...There is an Electoral Uprising coming...Here are SEVEN important pieces. Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. Please remember that the US regimestream news media is (at least until the Bush cabal's cause is utterly lost) a full partner in a Triad of shared special interest (i.e. energy, weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacco, etc.) with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party...
LA Times Editorial: It's no wonder the Bush team, hobbled by such a record, acts as if it can win only if voters treat this election as a referendum on Kerry's fitness for office. It should be clear by now that Kerry is not for some Stalinist government healthcare system, that he won't give Paris a veto over U.S. foreign policy and that he doesn't think terrorism is merely a nuisance. He was thoughtful and firm in all three debates, despite his enduring stiffness. The shrillness of the Bush camp's attacks on Kerry betrays an unbecoming desperation, and adds to the sense that the challenger came out the convincing winner.
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: Kerry quoted Bush's bizarre statement from March of 2002 about Bush no longer being concerned about Osama bin Laden. Bush tried to claim Kerry was exaggerating, but the White House website says different. Bush: "So I don't know where he is. Nor - you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I...I truly am not that concerned about him." Beyond the glaring silliness of this lie - millions of Americans saw the filmclip of Bush making this statement when they saw Moore's documentary 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - is the frightening truth behind it. If Bush truly does not care about or worry about Osama bin Laden, as his March statement indicates, he is truly an Army of One, divorced from one of the most fundamental concerns within the American mind...
There was a statesman and a salesman on that debate stage on Wednesday night. Kerry, the statesman, was calm and clear, in command of the facts, and not afraid to stare into the camera at the American people and tell some hard truths. Bush, the salesman, left behind the muddled foolishness of the first debate and the screaming histrionics of the second debate, in favor of an aw-shucks smirk and a series of ill-timed snickers that makes one truly wonder if he knows his job is on the line. All the pundits agreed that Bush, having lost the first two debates, needed to dominate during this third and final meeting. He failed completely to do so.
In the end, it comes down to values. When Schieffer asked Bush at one point about the problem of health care for America's seniors, Bush burst into a fit of laughter. If there was ever a moment, in any of these three debates, that let people know exactly where Bush's head and heart and priorities lay, that was it. He laughed.
Jason B. Johnson, S.F. Chronicle: The Rev. Jesse Jackson warned Tuesday that if the November election ends in controversy, Democrats will fight back much more fiercely than they did after the 2000 election.
Jackson's remarks before a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre reflect a readiness by Democrats to start a legal ground war over perceived voter irregularities. He recently joined the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry as a senior adviser.
"If it's reasonably close, we're headed toward a battle like we've never seen before," Jackson said. "But this time around we must not be passive in the face of it."
Many of the party faithful criticized the Democratic leadership for reacting too timidly to Republican political maneuverings and lawsuits filed in Florida after the 2000 election. And African Americans were angered by reports that thousands of blacks in the state had been purged from the rolls after being improperly included on a list of felons.
ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press: Elections officials have rebuffed an attempt by a former GOP operative to purge about 17,000 Democrats from the voter rolls in the battleground state of Nevada, where the two presidential candidates are in a dead heat.
Larry Lomax, the Clark County registrar of voters, rejected the challenge filed by former state Republican Party Chair Dan Burdish last week that claimed the Democrats should be removed from the rolls because they were inactive voters.
Lomax said Burdish could only challenge voters in his precinct, and then only if he has personal knowledge that they are inactive.
"I don't think pulling names off a database equates to personal knowledge," Lomax said.
Jim Loeb, IPS: Bush administration's failure to accept advice on Iraq from its military and foreign service officers has led to policies that have fuelled the insurgency against U.S.-led forces in the occupied nation, says a letter signed by some 500 national-security specialists.
Released Tuesday by a group called Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy (S3FP), the letter calls the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq the United States' "most misguided" policy since the Vietnam War.
"The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests," according to the group, which called for a "fundamental reassessment" in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation.
"We're advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging," said Barry Posen, the Ford international professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the organisers of S3FP, which includes some of the most eminent U.S. experts on national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world.
Among the signers are six of the last seven presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and professors who teach in more than 150 colleges and universities in 40 states.
Jason Leopold, www.commondreams.org: The report on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and “created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.
“Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein's government earned more than $7.5 billion,” the report says. “At the same time, by demanding kickbacks from foreign companies that received oil or that supplied consumer goods, Iraq received at least $2 billion more to spend on weapons or on Saddam's extravagant palaces.”
The oil-for-food program was supervised by the U.N. and ran from 1996 until the war started in Iraq last year. It was designed to alleviate the effects sanctions had on Iraqi citizens by allowing limited quantities of oil to be sold to buy food and medicine. But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn’t identified in Duelfer’s report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil.
Seymour Hersch, UC Berkley: The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).
The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-debate14oct14,1,878488.story
October 14, 2004 E-mail story Print
EDITORIAL
Overall, a Convincing Winner
President Bush's handlers tried to minimize the significance of his three debates with Sen. John F. Kerry, exaggerating Bush's lack of debating skills while insisting that he is the stronger leader. The trouble with this spin is that tens of millions of Americans watching the debates didn't feel they were watching a mere academic exercise. Stitched together, these three extraordinary exchanges amounted to a powerful indictment of the president's leadership.
Even on foreign policy and national security, supposedly the president's strong suit, Kerry had Bush on the defensive in the first debate, attacking him for fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq while failing to capture Osama bin Laden and to prevent the acceleration of nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea.
That the president was on the defensive again Wednesday night, in a debate devoted to domestic policy, is less surprising. Again, Kerry made a compelling case that, for all his plain-talkin' West Texas bravado, Bush had failed to lead. When asked about healthy budget surpluses turning to huge deficits on his watch, the president said the nation needed "fiscal sanity in the halls of the Congress" in a plaintive tone that suggested he had as much influence over what happened there as he did over Jacques Chirac. But Bush's loyal Republican lieutenants are running both chambers of Congress. Moreover, as Kerry noted in debate No. 2, Bush is about to become the first president since the 19th century who failed to veto a single bill in an entire four-year term. That is an abrogation of a president's power to impose "fiscal sanity" on Congress.
Bush's weakness as a leader was also manifest in his response to a question about why he failed to renew the ban on assault weapons, which he professed to support. He basically said he didn't have the votes on Capitol Hill, even though the ban would have passed had GOP leaders allowed a vote, something Bush should have ordered.
That isn't to say that Kerry has all the answers, or that Bush's charm was not in evidence, particularly in Wednesday's meeting. Kerry was in full pander mode on Social Security, and Bush was both profound and sincere in discussing his religious faith and its influence on his policies. But overall, Bush doesn't have a strong hand, and both his opponent and his advisors know it. Bush led the nation to a war that much of the rest of the world, as well as a small majority of Americans, now thinks was unjustified. He wrecked the Treasury's finances with reckless tax cuts that still failed to prevent him from becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs.
It's no wonder the Bush team, hobbled by such a record, acts as if it can win only if voters treat this election as a referendum on Kerry's fitness for office. It should be clear by now that Kerry is not for some Stalinist government healthcare system, that he won't give Paris a veto over U.S. foreign policy and that he doesn't think terrorism is merely a nuisance. He was thoughtful and firm in all three debates, despite his enduring stiffness. The shrillness of the Bush camp's attacks on Kerry betrays an unbecoming desperation, and adds to the sense that the challenger came out the convincing winner.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101504Z.shtml
Game. Set. Match.
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 14 October 2004
"Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."
- George W. Bush, 10/13/04
"So I don't know where he is. Nor - you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I...I truly am not that concerned about him."
- George W. Bush, 03/13/02
The third and final debate between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry was slated to be about domestic issues. It finished as a crystal-clear argument about basic American values, and made clear for all who watched or listened where each of these candidates stand.
Bob Schieffer of CBS News, the moderator for this last debate, put a series of questions to both candidates about the minimum wage, about Social Security, about the assault weapons ban, about health care. It must be noted that Schieffer failed completely, demonstrably and shamefully to put a single question to either candidate about protecting the environment and alternative energy, but the questions he did lay out afforded the American people a long, hard look at where Bush and Kerry stand on a number of lynchpin issues..
The words of the candidates speak for themselves.
Schieffer, questioning Bush: "You said that if Congress would vote to extend the ban on assault weapons, that you'd sign the legislation, but you did nothing to encourage the Congress to extend it. Why not?"
Bush response: "I believe law-abiding citizens ought to be able to own a gun. I believe in background checks at gun shows or anywhere to make sure that guns don't get in the hands of people that shouldn't have them. But the best way to protect our citizens from guns is to prosecute those who commit crimes with guns. And that's why early in my administration I called the attorney general and the U.S. attorneys and said: Put together a task force all around the country to prosecute those who commit crimes with guns. And the prosecutions are up by about 68 percent -- I believe -- is the number. Neighborhoods are safer when we crack down on people who commit crimes with guns. To me, that's the best way to secure America."
Kerry response: "I ran one of the largest district attorney's offices in America, one of the ten largest. I put people behind bars for the rest of their life. I've broken up organized crime. I know something about prosecuting. And most of the law enforcement agencies in America wanted that assault weapons ban. They don't want to go into a drug bust and be facing an AK-47. I was hunting in Iowa last year with a sheriff from one of the counties there, and he pointed to a house in back of us, and said, 'See the house over? We just did a drug bust a week earlier, and the guy we arrested had an AK-47 lying on the bed right beside him.' Because of the president's decision today, law enforcement officers will walk into a place that will be more dangerous. Terrorists can now come into America and go to a gun show and, without even a background check, buy an assault weapon today. And that's what Osama bin Laden's handbook said, because we captured it in Afghanistan. It encouraged them to do it."
In this exchange, Bush sided with the National Rifle Association, which has sadly become an institution that supports any and all weapons, up to and including personal rocket launchers and buzz-saw machine guns, in the hands of any American, regardless of criminal background. Kerry, the former prosecutor, injected a strong dose of law-enforcement reality into the conversation. Supporting the repeal of the assault weapons ban is tantamount to approving of cops walking into a spray of 7.62mm assault rounds while trying to do their jobs.
Schieffer, questioning Kerry: "The gap between rich and poor is growing wider. More people are dropping into poverty. Yet the minimum wage has been stuck at, what, $5.15 an hour now for about seven years. Is it time to raise it?"
Kerry response: "The minimum wage is the lowest minimum wage value it has been in our nation in 50 years. If we raise the minimum wage, which I will do over several years to $7 an hour, 9.2 million women who are trying to raise their families would earn another $3,800 a year. The president has denied 9.2 million women $3,800 a year, but he doesn't hesitate to fight for $136,000 to a millionaire. One percent of America got $89 billion last year in a tax cut, but people working hard, playing by the rules, trying to take care of their kids, family values, that we're supposed to value so much in America - I'm tired of politicians who talk about family values and don't value families...I think that it is a matter of fundamental right that if we raise the minimum wage, 15 million Americans would be positively affected."
Bush response: "Let me talk about what's really important for the worker you're referring to. And that's to make sure the education system works. It's to make sure we raise standards. Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it. The No Child Left Behind Act says, "We'll raise standards. We'll increase federal spending. But in return for extra spending, we now want people to measure -- states and local jurisdictions to measure to show us whether or not a child can read or write or add and subtract. You cannot solve a problem unless you diagnose the problem. And we weren't diagnosing problems. And therefore just kids were being shuffled through the school."
Kerry spoke to millions of Americans who get paid a minimum wage better suited to the economic realities of the Truman administration. A higher minimum wage lifts those millions of Americans working McJobs, which are the lion's share of the 'new jobs' created under this administration, to a place where they can begin to dream of someday possibly joining the oft-ballyhooed middle class. A higher minimum wage opens the entire economy up to the kind of consumer spending that is the lifeblood of our system. Bush, by comparison, avoided the question entirely and wandered off into a confused paean for his tragically underfunded No Child Left Behind bill. This became his refuge several times on Wednesday night; when he had no answer, he flogged NCLB.
Laying it out on the razor, Bush backed machine guns in our neighborhoods toted by people who take the risk of selling drugs instead of working a counter job, because the counter jobs available to them can't possibly begin to pay a living wage thanks to the currently anemic minimum wage. Kerry, by contrast, would get the machine guns off the streets, period, and at the same time make sure anyone working a minimum wage job will make enough money to feed their family and keep a roof over their head.
Beyond the clear delineation of values exposed in this last exchange is the ugly fact that Bush went out of his way to dodge as many hard questions as he could get away from. How does nattering about NCLB answer the question of the minimum wage? Was Bush afraid of offending his corporate backers on that one? The folks who support him are happy to keep the minimum wage where it is, because it increases their bottom line. It was this exchange, above all the others, that displayed where Bush stands when it comes to the American people. He does not stand with you if you don't have a few million, at least, in the bank.
The NCLB refuge received a direct hit from Kerry at one point, when the Senator said, "Five hundred thousand kids lost after-school programs because of your budget. Now, that's not in my gut. That's not in my value system, and certainly not so that the wealthiest people in America can walk away with another tax cut. $89 billion last year to the top 1 percent of Americans, but kids lost their after-school programs. You be the judge."
Dodging the question is not an American value, Mr. Bush.
Consider the question Schieffer put to Bush on Social Security: "We all know that Social Security is running out of money, and it has to be fixed. You have proposed to fix it by letting people put some of the money collected to pay benefits into private savings accounts. But the critics are saying that's going to mean finding $1 trillion over the next 10 years to continue paying benefits as those accounts are being set up. So where do you get the money? Are you going to have to increase the deficit by that much over 10 years?
Bush's answer? "There is a problem for our youngsters, a real problem. And if we don't act today, the problem will be valued in the trillions. And so I think we need to think differently. We'll honor our commitment to our seniors. But for our children and our grandchildren, we need to have a different strategy. And recognizing that, I called together a group of our fellow citizens to study the issue. It was a committee chaired by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat. And they came up with a variety of ideas for people to look at. I believe that younger workers ought to be allowed to take some of their own money and put it in a personal savings account, because I understand that they need to get better rates of return than the rates of return being given in the current Social Security trust. And the compounding rate of interest effect will make it more likely that the Social Security system is solvent for our children and our grandchildren. I will work with Republicans and Democrats. It'll be a vital issue in my second term. It is an issue that I am willing to take on, and so I'll bring Republicans and Democrats together. And we're of course going to have to consider the costs. But I want to warn my fellow citizens: The cost of doing nothing, the cost of saying the current system is OK, far exceeds the costs of trying to make sure we save the system for our children."
Note well that Schieffer asked a pointed question: "But the critics are saying that's going to mean finding $1 trillion over the next 10 years to continue paying benefits as those accounts are being set up. So where do you get the money? Are you going to have to increase the deficit by that much over 10 years?"
Bush had no answer whatsoever. He gassed. This happened repeatedly throughout the night.
Kerry quoted Bush's bizarre statement from March of 2002 about Bush no longer being concerned about Osama bin Laden. Bush tried to claim Kerry was exaggerating, but the White House website says different. Bush: "So I don't know where he is. Nor - you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I...I truly am not that concerned about him." Beyond the glaring silliness of this lie - millions of Americans saw the filmclip of Bush making this statement when they saw Moore's documentary 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - is the frightening truth behind it. If Bush truly does not care about or worry about Osama bin Laden, as his March statement indicates, he is truly an Army of One, divorced from one of the most fundamental concerns within the American mind.
Bush said Pell Grants had increased under his tenure, and had previously promised to increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $5,100. Yet his fiscal year 2005 budget is the third in a row that has refused to increase the value over the current amount of $4,050. The value of the maximum Pell award has fallen dramatically in the past years from covering 94% of the public two-year institution to just 68% today. Kerry did well to split this lie open by stating, "You know why the Pell Grants have gone up in their numbers? Because more people qualify for them because they don't have money. But they're not getting the $5,100 the president promised them. They're getting less money. We have more people who qualify. That's not what we want."
Bush said he supported Mitch McConnell's minimum wage bill. In fact, he supported minimum wage increase by $1.00 per hour, but only if states could opt out of the increase. According to the Associated Press, Bush's qualification for a minimum wage increase was, "a condition that could render a proposed increase meaningless." Bush and the Republicans are rapidly approaching the record set in the 1980s for the longest period without an increase adjusted for inflation. The minimum wage is 24.5% lower than it was 24 years ago and is rapidly approaching an all-time low set in 1989. Bush has not used his influence to pass a minimum wage law in Congress, where the law cannot even get out of committee. This follows a pattern, as Bush, while governor of Texas, resisted raising that state's decade-old minimum wage, which was only $3.35 an hour.
Lying is not an American value, Mr. Bush.
There was a statesman and a salesman on that debate stage on Wednesday night. Kerry, the statesman, was calm and clear, in command of the facts, and not afraid to stare into the camera at the American people and tell some hard truths. Bush, the salesman, left behind the muddled foolishness of the first debate and the screaming histrionics of the second debate, in favor of an aw-shucks smirk and a series of ill-timed snickers that makes one truly wonder if he knows his job is on the line. All the pundits agreed that Bush, having lost the first two debates, needed to dominate during this third and final meeting. He failed completely to do so.
In the end, it comes down to values. When Schieffer asked Bush at one point about the problem of health care for America's seniors, Bush burst into a fit of laughter. If there was ever a moment, in any of these three debates, that let people know exactly where Bush's head and heart and priorities lay, that was it. He laughed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/13/BAGEC98SVN1.DTL
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SAN FRANCISCO
Jackson warns of legal war after close election
Jason B. Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
The Rev. Jesse Jackson warned Tuesday that if the November election ends in controversy, Democrats will fight back much more fiercely than they did after the 2000 election.
Jackson's remarks before a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre reflect a readiness by Democrats to start a legal ground war over perceived voter irregularities. He recently joined the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry as a senior adviser.
"If it's reasonably close, we're headed toward a battle like we've never seen before," Jackson said. "But this time around we must not be passive in the face of it."
Many of the party faithful criticized the Democratic leadership for reacting too timidly to Republican political maneuverings and lawsuits filed in Florida after the 2000 election. And African Americans were angered by reports that thousands of blacks in the state had been purged from the rolls after being improperly included on a list of felons.
Democratic groups have already filed lawsuits in the battleground states of Florida, Michigan and Colorado over provisional balloting and voter registration rules they say disqualified poor and minority voters.
Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University, said there were hundreds of lawyers all over the country on both sides watching to make sure the election is not stolen.
Because each state has its own set of election rules and machines, there is a potential for controversy in states with close election results, Raskin said.
Jackson is stumping for Kerry in several swing states during the final weeks of the campaign. During his speech, Jackson also accused the Bush administration of weakening U.S. credibility abroad with the war in Iraq and of ignoring the environment, workers and minorities.
In the four years Bush has been in office, he's refused to meet with labor unions, environmentalists and the NAACP, Jackson said.
"If China were to attack Taiwan pre-emptively, we couldn't tell them what to do" (because we pre-emptively attacked Iraq), Jackson said. "We can't address the Sudan and Haiti crises because we don't have the strength to reach beyond the sinking sand of Iraq."
"That ideology has driven us to isolation," said Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988 and was named special envoy to Africa by President Bill Clinton in 1997. "It is driven by a narrow partisan ideology."
E-mail Jason B. Johnson at jbjohnson@sfchronicle.com.
Page B - 4
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/10/13/politics1305EDT0543.DTL
Officials block challenge to 17,000 Democratic voters on rolls in Nevada
ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
(10-13) 14:38 PDT LAS VEGAS (AP) --
Elections officials have rebuffed an attempt by a former GOP operative to purge about 17,000 Democrats from the voter rolls in the battleground state of Nevada, where the two presidential candidates are in a dead heat.
Larry Lomax, the Clark County registrar of voters, rejected the challenge filed by former state Republican Party Chair Dan Burdish last week that claimed the Democrats should be removed from the rolls because they were inactive voters.
Lomax said Burdish could only challenge voters in his precinct, and then only if he has personal knowledge that they are inactive.
"I don't think pulling names off a database equates to personal knowledge," Lomax said.
Under state law, voters are placed on "inactive status" if they move and don't update their addresses within 30 days of receiving notice to do so. Their registrations are then canceled if they don't vote in two consecutive federal elections.
Democrats have criticized Burdish for trying to influence the hotly contested congressional race between Republican Rep. Jon Porter and his Democratic challenger, former casino executive Tom Gallagher, in the 3rd District.
But Burdish denied trying to disenfranchise people, saying he only wants to prevent people from voting "in a local district they are not allowed to vote in."
Meanwhile, an Arizona consulting firm denied Wednesday that a group it hired to register Republicans in Nevada deliberately tore up Democratic voter registration forms.
Eric Russell, a former employee of Voters Outreach of America, said he witnessed a supervisor shred eight to 10 Democratic registration forms from prospective voters.
Nathan Sproul, chief executive of Sproul & Associates, said his firm was contracted by the Republican National Committee to register voters, but he denied Russell's accusations that Democratic registration forms were destroyed.
He characterized Russell as a disgruntled former employee who was fired last month.
Federal officials said they have not received any complaints of wrongdoing. A spokesman for the Nevada Secretary of State's office said it was investigating whether any state or federal laws were broken.
The latest polls have showed President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry running within a few percentage points of each other in Nevada. Democrat Al Gore lost the state by fewer than 22,000 votes in 2000.
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25848
IRAQ:
Bush Policies 'Fuel Violence', Say 500 U.S. Scholars
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 13 (IPS) - The Bush administration's failure to accept advice on Iraq from its military and foreign service officers has led to policies that have fuelled the insurgency against U.S.-led forces in the occupied nation, says a letter signed by some 500 national-security specialists.
Released Tuesday by a group called Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy (S3FP), the letter calls the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq the United States' "most misguided" policy since the Vietnam War.
"The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests," according to the group, which called for a "fundamental reassessment" in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation.
"We're advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging," said Barry Posen, the Ford international professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the organisers of S3FP, which includes some of the most eminent U.S. experts on national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world.
Among the signers are six of the last seven presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and professors who teach in more than 150 colleges and universities in 40 states.
Besides Posen, the main organisers included Stanley Kaufman of the University of Delaware; Michael Brown, director of Security Studies at Georgetown University; Michael Desch, who holds the Robert M Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-Making at the Bush School of government at Texas A & M University; and Jessica Stern, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, who also served in a senior counter-terrorism post in the National Security Council during the former Clinton administration.
"I think it is telling that so many specialists on international relations, who rarely agree on anything, are unified in their position on the high costs that the U.S. is incurring from this war," said Robert Keohane of Duke University in North Carolina.
Their critique mirrors an unprecedented statement released by 27 retired top-ranking foreign service and military officials in June, many of whom said they had voted for Bush in the 2000 election.
The 27, called Diplomats for Change, accused the administration of leading the country "into an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is uncertain." As their name suggested, they called for Bush to be defeated in 2004.
The new statement's signatories also includes a number of retired government officials, some career military and foreign service officers, and political appointees in Democratic and Republican administrations, who are currently working at colleges and universities.
Much of their critique echoes arguments voiced by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry who, in recent weeks, has pounded away at alleged failures in the way Bush has prosecuted the "war on terrorism," particularly with respect to Iraq.
"We judge that the current American policy centred around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists," S3FP writes.
"One result has been a great distortion in the terms of public debate on foreign and national security policy -- an emphasis on speculation instead of facts, on mythology instead of calculation and on misplaced moralising over considerations of national interest."
The scholars applauded the Bush administration for its initial focus on destroying Afghanistan bases of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, but charged that its subsequent "failure to engage sufficient U.S. troops to capture or kill the mass of al-Qaeda fighters in the later stages of that war was a great blunder."
The letter noted that "many of the justifications" provided by the administration for the Iraq war, including an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his programmes for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), have proven "untrue" and that North Korea and Pakistan pose much greater risks of nuclear proliferation to terrorists.
"Even on moral grounds, the case for war was dubious: the war itself has killed over a thousand Americans and unknown thousands of Iraqis, and if the threat of civil war becomes reality, ordinary Iraqis could be even worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein," it argues.
Since the invasion, policy errors "have created a situation in Iraq worse than it needed to be," adds the letter, which said the administration ignored advice from the Army Chief of Staff on the need for many more U.S. troops to provide security and from the State Department and other U.S. agencies on how reconstruction could be carried out.
"As a result, Iraqi popular dismay at the lack of security, jobs or reliable electric power fuels much of the violent opposition to the U.S. military presence, while the war itself has drawn in terrorists from outside Iraq."
While Hussein's removal was "desirable," according to the scholars, the actual benefit to the United States was "small," particularly because Iraq posed far less of a threat to the United States or its allies than the administration had asserted.
Worse, the occupation's failures, such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, have acted as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and similar groups throughout the region, according to the letter. (END/2004)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1012-33.htm
Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Hussein Siphon Billions from UN Oil-for-Food Program
by Jason Leopold
When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation’s oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.
The report on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and “created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.
“Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein's government earned more than $7.5 billion,” the report says. “At the same time, by demanding kickbacks from foreign companies that received oil or that supplied consumer goods, Iraq received at least $2 billion more to spend on weapons or on Saddam's extravagant palaces.”
The oil-for-food program was supervised by the U.N. and ran from 1996 until the war started in Iraq last year. It was designed to alleviate the effects sanctions had on Iraqi citizens by allowing limited quantities of oil to be sold to buy food and medicine.
But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn’t identified in Duelfer’s report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil.
Since the oil-for-food program began, Iraq has sold $40 billion worth of oil. U.S. and European officials have long argued that the increase in Iraq’s oil production also expanded Saddam's ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq was skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program thanks to companies like Halliburton and former executives such as Cheney.
U.N. documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had controversial dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney's tenure at the company and played a part in helping Saddam Hussein illegally pocket billions of dollars under the U.N.’s oil-for-food program. The Clinton administration blocked one deal Halliburton was trying to push through sale because it was "not authorized under the oil-for-food deal," according to U.N. documents. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell nearly $1 million in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya. Still, Halliburton used one of foreign subsidiaries to sell Iraq the equipment it needed so the country could pump more oil, according to a report in the Washington Post in June 2001.
The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the United States -- according to the Post, to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War years earlier.
Cheney’s hard-line stance against Iraq on the campaign trail is hypocritical considering that during his tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney pushed the U.N. Security Council, after he became CEO to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil related equipment, to Iraq. Cheney has said sanctions against countries like Iraq unfairly punish U.S. companies.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied that under his leadership, Halliburton did business with Iraq. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, "Iraq's different." He claimed that he imposed a "firm policy" prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.
"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program "This Week" on July 30, 2000. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."
But Cheney’s denials don’t hold up. Halliburton played a major role in helping Iraq repair its oil fields during the mid-1990s that allowed Saddam to siphon off funds from the oil-for-food program to fund a weapons program, which Cheney and President Bush insist was the case.
As secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein's government. After Cheney was named chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.
But that changed when it appeared that Halliburton was headed for a financial crisis in the mid-1990s. Cheney said sanctions against countries like Iraq were hurting corporations such as Halliburton.
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government," Cheney said at an energy conference in April 1996, reported in the oil industry publication Petroleum Finance Week.
"The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments," he observed during his conference presentation.
Sanctions make U.S. businesses "the bystander who gets hit when a train wreck occurs," Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. "While virtually every other country sees the need for sanctions against Iraq and Saddam Hussein's regime there, Cheney sees general agreement that the measures have not been very effective despite their having most of the international community's support.
An individual country's embargo, such as that of the United States against Iran, has virtually no effect since the target country simply signs a contract with a non- U.S. business," the publication reported.
© 2004 Jason Leopold
###
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101404E.shtml
Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the
Secrets of the Iraq Quagmire and the War on Terror
By Bonnie Azab Powell
U.C. Berkeley News
Monday 11 October 2004
KQED host Michael Krasny was supposed to be interviewing Seymour Hersh (pictured), but the veteran journalist rarely let Krasny get a word in.
(Photo: Bart Nagel)
Berkeley - The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).
The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
From My Lai to Abu Ghraib
That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty...to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.
His country has not always thanked him for it - neocon Pentagon adviser Richard Perle has called Hersh "the closest thing we have to a terrorist," while his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, "The Dark Side of Camelot," cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.
Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.) And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."
"Bush Scares the Hell Out of Me"
Hersh was working the phone with sources up until the minute the presidential debate began, which he watched with a crowd in North Gate Hall.
(Photo: Bart Nagel)
Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh - who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a rowdy crowd - what he thought of the match.
"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."
With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.
While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the current situation in Iraq:
I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside - and there are a lot of good people inside - are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place - and here's what really irritates me again, about the press - since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 - the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
And yet - despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties - Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."
Enter the Utopians
"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.
"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"
Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. "They decided to wage war against their own population," he said. "It's a huge step, with enormous consequences....The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this man. And we fell for it."
What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country. "This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.
Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in ... [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."
'We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame…The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes.'
-Seymour Hersh
(Photo: Bart Nagel)
In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world - four months after it was first reported to the Department of Defense - Hersh speculated on why those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as some have claimed, the "stress outlet" or other spontaneous recreational ideas of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:
My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document...There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do ... The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners - many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets - would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."
And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts - and refused to take responsibility for it - ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, "We've been killing them for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs...If we had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff, the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world."
"They Just Shot Them One by One"
There was more - rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.
"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'
"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."
The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his critics may call him a "muckraker" and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very personally.
"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something...the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."
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Jump to TO Features for Thursday October 14
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=83323
President's Domestic Agenda Laid Bare
October 13, 2004
President Bush will finish his term with one of the worst economic records of any president in the last 70 years. He will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net decline in employment over a four year period. His tax and budget policies have produced the worst fiscal deterioration in a half century and the largest budget deficits in U.S. history. Five million more Americans have lost health insurance on his watch while those with coverage face double-digit cost increases. Poverty and inequality rates have risen for three straight years.
Jobs record: More than 800,000 total jobs; 1.6 million private sector jobs; and 2.7 million manufacturing lost over the last four years. As the Economic Policy Institute reports, when the president's last tax package (called the "Jobs and Growth Plan") took effect in 2003, the administration promised it would create 5.5 million new jobs by the end of 2004 – more than 300,000 new jobs per month. The economy produced only 96,000 jobs last month, more than 200,000 jobs fewer than predicted. In fact, as EPI states, "job creation [has] failed to meet the administration's projections in 13 of the last 15 months."
Health care record: 5 million more uninsured in the last four years and skyrocketing health care costs for everyone else. The president promised to address America's health care crisis during the 2000 campaign. Yet he did nothing. Now, 45 million Americans lack basic health coverage; health care costs are up nearly 60 percent; and those with coverage face double-digit increases in premiums and deductibles. The president continues to deny Americans the opportunity to import cheaper prescription drugs, choosing to favor the profits of the drug industry over the needs of the elderly.
Fiscal record: $5 trillion in projected budget surpluses turned into $5 trillion in projected debt over the next ten years. Trillions of dollars in tax cuts geared primarily to the wealth have blown a hole in the federal budget that threatens economic growth. When America's foreign creditors decide to pull the plug, average Americans will face steep declines in living standards, steep increases in interest rates, and few good job prospects.
Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund.