For your delectation. I suspect we are going to need a new economics. One tat takes into account the importance to a community of literally making things.

US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:

Sound recording industries - 97%

Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%

Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%

Metal ore mining - 65%

Motion picture and video industries - 64%

Wineries and distilleries - 64%

Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%

Book publishers - 63%

Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%

Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%

Rubber product - 53%

Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%

Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%

Plastics product - 51%

Other insurance related activities - 51%

Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%

Glass and glass product - 48%

Coal mining - 48%

Sugar and confectionery product - 48%

Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%

Advertising and related services - 41%

Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%

Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%

Securities brokerage - 38%

Other general purpose machinery - 37%

Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media - 36%

Support activities for mining - 36%

Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%

Chemical manufacturing - 30%

Industrial machinery - 30%

Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities - 30%

Other food - 29%

Motor vehicles and parts - 29%

Machinery manufacturing - 28%

Other electrical equipment and component - 28%

Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment activities - 27%

Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%

Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%

Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%

Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments - 25%

Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%

Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%

Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%

Basic chemical - 24%

Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%

Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%

Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%

Printing and related support activities - 21%

Chemical product and preparation - 20%

Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%

Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%

Publishing industries - 20%

Medical equipment and supplies - 20%

"my own stupid fault, as usual"
groaned George Michael
who rose to fame
in 1980s
pop group Wham!
now 42-years
arrested Saturday, found slumped
at the wheel
of his car at Hyde Park Corner
in possession of class C drugs
(marijuana, steroids, amphetamines)
said no complaints
about the cops
"who were professional throughout"

Lewis Lapham is a favorite writer of mine -- been reading him since I was in high school (and Nixon was president). I am happy to see that he has joined with John Conyers' efforts to hold President Bush accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors. Here is an excerpt from his latest essay in Harper's Magazine...

    The Case for Impeachment
    By Lewis H. Lapham
    Harper's Magazine

    Monday 27 February 2006

Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush.

A country is not only what it does - it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates.
-Kurt Tucholsky

    On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment." Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press-nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

    "To take away the excuse," he said, "that we didn't know." So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, "Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?" when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that "somehow it escaped our notice" that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

    A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

    "I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news."

    Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635-not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses-government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign-the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War," the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.

 

    That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to "kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."

    By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."

    The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; "even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts..." A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing "the intelligence and the facts...around the policy." The American enthusiasm for regime change, "undimmed" in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.

    Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs "legal justification" for the maneuver-something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification "currently exists." Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the "wrong-footing" of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]

    Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to "wrong-foot" Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]

    By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase "mushroom cloud" and prepares a White Paper describing the "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold-to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]

 

    The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years-misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as "enemy combatants," etc.-but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

 

    The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.

 

    Notes

    1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a matter of public record-newspaper accounts, television broadcasts (Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph Wilson. As the congressman had said, "Everything in plain sight; it isn't as if we don't know." [Back]

    2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" with a strong-minded "willingness to undertake military action." Together with Rumsfeld, six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first administration-Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document noting that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification" for the presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]

    3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it." [Back]

    4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]

    5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as "The Downing Street Minutes," were published in the Sunday Times (London) in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. [Back]

    6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, "The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical classified information." [Back]

    7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. [Back]

    8. Card later told the New York Times that "from a marketing point of view...you don't introduce new products in August." [Back]

The following piece from TomDispatch is quite long, but very enlightening, so stick with it.

 
 Mark Danner: You Can Do Anything with a Bayonet Except Sit on It
    TomDispatch.com

    Sunday 26 February 2006

A Tomdispatch interview with Mark Danner.

    On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are surrounded by the green of a northern California winter, though the temperature is pushing 70 degrees. An almost perfectly full moon, faded to a tattered white, sits overhead. Suddenly, I take a turn and start straight up, as if into the heavens, but in fact towards Grizzly Peak before turning yet again into a small street and pulling up in front of a wooden gate. You swing it open and proceed down a picturesque stone path through the world's tiniest grove of redwoods toward the yellow stucco cottage that was only recently the home of Nobel-Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, but is now the home - as yet almost furniture-less - of journalist Mark Danner, who has said that, as a young writer in search of "a kind of moral clarity," he gravitated toward countries where "massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil."

    Danner greets me at the door which, thrown open, reveals a bay window with a dazzling vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay and through which the sun blazes goldenly. In a rumpled dark shirt and slacks, he ushers me out onto a small stone patio. "This is where the deer hang out," he says and points to a small area just beyond our chairs where the grass is slightly pressed down. "They lie there contemplating me as I pace on the other side of the bay window. I feel like their ping pong game."

    Facing this peaceable kingdom, Danner has a slightly distracted, out-of-the-washer-but-not-the-drier look to him, except for his face, strangely unmarked, which would qualify as lighting up (even without the sun). He beams in such a welcoming way and there is in him something - in this setting at least - that makes it almost impossible to believe he has reported from some of the least hospitable, most dangerous spots on the planet over the last decades: Haiti in the 1980s, war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq, which he's visited three times in recent years, among other spots. He has covered the world for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and especially the New York Review of Books (whose editors have been kind enough to let a number of his pieces be posted at Tomdispatch.com).

    Danner is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA, and the Bush administration (and his primer on the subject, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, is a must for any bookshelf). A professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, his cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume, The Massacre at El Mozote, in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where over 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S. trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, The Secret Way to War, is due out in April.

    We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.

    Tomdispatch: I wanted to start with an area of expertise for you, torture policy. For me, the Bush administration's decision to enter this arena so quickly after 9/11 was a reach for power. If you can torture, you can do anything.

    Mark Danner: When you look at the record, the phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off." We hear this again and again. The interesting thing about that phrase is the implication that before we had the gloves on, that the laws and principles that constitute our belief not only in democracy but in human rights left the country vulnerable. The U.S. adherence to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. record of treating prisoners humanely that goes back to George Washington, laws like the FISA law passed to restrict the government's power to surveil its citizens - all of these constitute the gloves on American power and 9/11 signaled to those in power that the system with "the gloves on" was insufficient to protect Americans. That seems to be their belief.

    As you know, very shortly after 9/11, the then-White House counsel [Alberto Gonzales] proposed to President Bush that provisions of the Geneva Conventions had been rendered obsolete, even quaint, by this quote "new paradigm." The Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the federal statutes against torture - these undertakings by the U.S. - represented restrictions that would unduly hobble the country in fighting the war on terror and, by extension, threaten[ed] the existence of the United States. And I think that's where torture - "extreme interrogation" is the euphemism - goes to the heart of the reaction against the way this country has observed human rights in the past, a reaction in a way against law itself. What we have here is a conflict between legality and power.

    Torture is a very direct route from human rights, which is to say, restricted power, to unleashed power. We see a movement here backwards from ideals that were at the root of this country's founding during the enlightenment: the restriction of government power and the conviction that human beings had certain inherent rights, one of which was the freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment. Under this way of looking at the matter, those enlightenment ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were given to Americans, were extended through the Geneva Conventions, through the Convention against Torture, to all people - and the administration, in pushing extreme interrogation, in going from a secret abuse of power to a public one…

    TD: Wasn't it really less an abuse of power than a proclamation of power?

    Danner: Exactly. In what I've started to call Bush's state of exception, we've now reached the second stage. Many of these steps, including extreme interrogation, eavesdropping, arresting aliens - one could go down a list - were taken in relative or complete secrecy. Gradually, they have come into the light, becoming matters of political disputation; and, insofar as the administration's political antagonists have failed to overturn them, they have also become matters of accepted practice, which is where I think we are now. As we sit here, we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It would have been the very unusual observer, on seeing those photographs in April 2004, who would have predicted two years later that extreme interrogation would, in effect, have become accepted within the CIA. And though the Senate passed an amendment that forbade it, the President replied with a signing statement that essentially reserved his right to violate that amendment according to his supposed powers as commander-in-chief.

    In effect, the President claims to believe that his wartime powers give him carte blanche to break the law in any sphere where he decides national security is involved. An added element is the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The only countervailing power we've seen since 9/11 really lay in the June 2004 Supreme Court detention decisions. In one of them, Justice O'Connor declared that the President's power in wartime was not a blank check. Now, she's been replaced by an admitted believer in a "unitary executive." It was Alito when he was at the Justice Department who strongly pushed the strategy of presidential signing statements as a way to mitigate congressional assertions of power.

    TD: Weren't you struck by the fact that, of all the things top Bush officials did, their urge toward torture, toward taking the gloves off, was first and fastest? It was an impulse at the top.

    Danner: I think that's an interesting way to put it, an impulse at the top. The President and the Vice President have said that, after 9/11, they asked the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies to come to them with proposals. What should the U.S. do? Look, it's time to take the gloves off and every one of you has to show me the way to do it. General [Michael] Hayden said in an interview just the other night that, with the NSA eavesdropping program, he was responding to a request from the White House.

    TD: Wasn't it Rumsfeld, when they were "interviewing" John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in Afghanistan, who actually told the interrogators to take the gloves off?

    Danner: According to a Newsweek report, Rumsfeld had someone essentially telephone the interrogators: Do what you have to do. Go as far as you have to go.

    Creating Reality

    TD: Torture hasn't exactly been absent from U.S. government policy in our lifetimes, but one difference, it seems to me, is the degree to which our leaders have been involved. I think Rumsfeld was getting reports on the Lindh interrogation by the hour.

    Danner: When we look at the techniques used by the CIA, these things go back a ways. Alfred McCoy and others have written about this. These techniques of torture, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, are reappearing. There is one very important difference: the explicit official approval and the determination to defend these techniques in the case of public exposure and public controversy. And torture has survived its exposure - a critical difference. The clear evidence of intent at the very top of the government is also striking. At a certain point, of course, you have to get into the realm of the psycho-political, which is a very mushy realm.

    TD: Let's do it anyway.

    Danner: The central question here is: Why did we have the kind of response we did after 9/11? The Bush administration, which professed itself so strong on national security, had let the United States suffer the most catastrophic attack on its territory in history. We have to remind ourselves of the effect of this. Remember, their major security programs were the Strategic Defense Initiative and confronting China. They thought that terrorism, which they didn't care about, was a matter for sissies. Like humanitarian intervention, the threat posed by non-state actors - and many other concerns of the previous administration - all this stuff was, as they saw it, a kid's view of national security, so they ignored it. And afterwards they knew very well that reports existed showing how they had ignored it, most notably the PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was famously entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US." This was a very human thing. Having proclaimed how strong they were on national security, they were attacked. I think that accounted, to some degree, for the ferocity of the counterattack. You don't need to get too deep to see that. When you look at this idea of the gloves coming off, the implication is very much exculpatory. They're saying, in effect: Before the gloves were on, so we weren't able to detect and prevent this attack.

    General Hayden has explicitly said, had this [NSA warrantless eavesdropping] program been in place, we would have prevented 9/11. There's no evidence of that, but when you talk about the psycho-political roots of this stuff, I think it's very revealing. It also dovetails with the concerns of several prominent officials, especially Rumsfeld and Cheney, that the government had been unduly hobbled during the late Vietnam War era. Cheney has said this explicitly. We're talking about the War Powers Resolution, which was passed in 1973. FISA is out of the same complex of political concerns, though it was passed under Carter.

    TD: They chafed under FISA in the Reagan era.

    Danner: Oh, indeed they did. Then there were the Church and Pike hearings of the mid-1970s, which, in their view, disabled the CIA. So part of this has to do with righting wrongs that they believe were committed in an earlier and very traumatic time in their lives. Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense just after the Vietnam War. Cheney was chief of staff in a White House that was under siege. So history is coming back to haunt this era in a personal and vivid way.

    TD: You've often quoted a piece in which reporter Ron Suskind is told by an unidentified senior administration official that he's in the "reality-based community," after which that official says something striking: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality." Care to comment?

    Danner: I think that quote is immensely revealing. It underlines their policies in all kinds of areas, their belief that the overwhelming or preponderant power of the United States can simply change fact, can change truth. It is quite indicative of their policy of public information inside the United States. They don't care about people who read the New York Times, for instance. I use that as a shorthand. They don't care about people concerned with facts. They care about the broader arc of the story. We sit here constantly citing facts - that they've broken this or that law, that what they originally said turns out not to be true. None of this particularly interests them.

    What interests them is the larger reality believed by the 50.1% that they need to govern. Kenneth Duberstein said this recently - he was chief of staff to Ronald Reagan - that this administration is unique in that they govern with 50.1%. He was referring not to elections but to popularity while governing. His notion was that Reagan would want to get 60-65% backing him, while the Bush people want a bare majority, which means they have a much more extremist policy because they're appealing to the base. It makes them very hard-knuckle when approaching politics, simply wanting the base plus one.

    On empire, what's unusual about this administration isn't only its focus on power, but on unilateralism. It's the flip side of isolationism. The notion that alliances, economic or political, and international law inevitably hinder the most powerful nation. You know, the image of the strings around Gulliver. They said in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2005 version, that rivals will continue to challenge us using the strategies of the weak including "international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." They're associating terror and asymmetric warfare with international law as similar ways to blunt the overwhelming power of the United States. That represents an attitude toward international law and institutions that, I think, is a real and dramatic break from past practice in the United States. In our history, certainly recently, there's just no comparison to them - no government anywhere near as radical.

    TD: They're really extreme American nationalists, though you can't use that word in this country.

    Danner: That's true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That's the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism - that is, weapons of the weak

    TD: Weapons of mass interference.

    Danner: I should add that, in my view, the era of neocon leadership is clearly coming to an end. The impression that they were ever entirely in control is wrong in any event and the vanguard of the neocons has obviously been blunted by the great failure of Iraq - because their assumption of preponderant American power turned out not to be true. Napoleon had this wonderful line that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. Military power is good for blowing things up; it's good for destroying things. It's not good for building a new order. It takes a great deal more power, skill, and patience to construct an enduring order in Iraq. The United States doesn't have sufficient power; it doesn't have the skill; and we know it doesn't have the patience. One part of the Axis of Evil has been occupied - you can think of it as the part of the Axis that has sacrificed itself to make way for the greater freedom (freedom from attack, freedom perhaps to build nuclear weapons) of North Korea and Iran. Although I think the U.S. has dealt with Iran rather cleverly in the last few months, they're playing a very weak hand. After all, the use of military force against Iran is now out of the question in large part because of the disaster next door in Iraq and the way Iran's hand has been strengthened by that disaster.

    TD: Here's my hesitation: If these people are pushed to the wall, I could construct a scenario for you, I believe, in which Iran, crazy as it might seem, could be hit.

    Danner: The difference we have on this just has to do with how willing we are to imagine the utter irrationality of the administration. When I look at Iran now, the upside of a military strike of a kind that they could do, with aerial bombardment, and the downside of such a step seems obviously to be so wildly out of proportion, I can't believe even they would take that step.

    The Age of Frozen Scandal

    TD: You've talked about our current American world as one of "frozen scandal," an interesting phrase. When you first used it, we were in the Downing Street Memo scandal and nothing was happening. Now, we're immersed in the NSA and other scandals and nothing is happening…

    Danner: The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as step one, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step two would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and others. And finally, step three would be expiation - the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, look we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.

    TD: You get revelation and repetition.

    Danner: Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished…

    TD: …minor figures…

    Danner: …who were silly enough to get themselves caught - for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they're still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.

    TD: You've interviewed some interrogators, haven't you?

    Danner: Indeed, and I've had from them accounts of some of the things that were done. The great problem in the Age of Frozen Scandal is that it's as if we're this spinning wheel, constantly confirming facts that we already knew, so the revelations become less and less effective in causing public outrage. The public begins to become inured to it, corrupted in its turn.

    TD: I'm going to suggest something grimmer. In what's likely to be the dirtiest election any of us has experienced, if the Democrats actually took one house of Congress in November 2006 and begin to investigate, I think you'd enter the era of frozen investigation. The administration will claim commander-in-chief rights.

    Danner: That's a good prediction. The Bush administration is already stonewalling extremely timid Republican-led committees when it comes to the response to Hurricane Katrina or NSA eavesdropping. If the Democrats do take control of a house of Congress and mount real investigations, on the one hand, they'll be very circumspect because they'll be concerned about jeopardizing their chances in the elections of 2008. On the other hand, you'll have the overwhelming claim of commander-in-chief power which could completely handcuff investigations.

    TD: I came across this sentence today in a piece on the Plame case. "A spokesman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak was ongoing. The spokesman refused to give her name."

    Danner: (laughs) A secret spokesman.

    TD: So you've got secrecy, lying, and a third thing you've brought up before, a bizarre kind of frankness. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

    Danner: There's been an interesting ambivalence in the administration when it comes to all these actions they've taken in the name of national security - between the impulse to deny and stonewall and the impulse to come forward and very boldly assert that they took such actions in the name of national security. You see it in eavesdropping, where Karl Rove has clearly indicated a preference for declaring, in a very clever response to the NSA revelation, "If al-Qaeda is talking to someone in the United States we want to know about it. Apparently some Democrats don't." Which is basically to say: If you're concerned about this, you're weakening the United States. All this human rights, Fourth Amendment stuff is so much hooey.

    In essence, this is an assault on the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is in the Constitution because the framers understood that a lot of these rights, especially when under pressure in wartime, are not particularly popular. So they were put in permanently, so as not to be subject to majority control or majority abnegation. It's politics of the most savagely bare-knuckle and dangerous kind when you use that gap between the country's precepts as embodied in the Constitution and the fact that many of these become unpopular in time of war to destroy your political opponents, which is what this administration does.

    There are many in the administration who want to come out four-square for these things. You saw that impulse also with interrogation. They could have come out after Abu Ghraib - there were hints of this - and said, "Yes, there are a few bad apples, but yes, we use extreme interrogation, we do it to defend the country." And if they'd done this, they might have pumped up a majority who would, for example, have supported waterboarding.

    When I talk about these matters, there's an ambivalence on my part as well because one becomes extremely upset that they're lying in public and doing these things in secret and denying them; but, on the other hand, I fear the kind of populist technique they could use if they declared these policies openly to rally support for themselves.

    All this, of course, begs the question of a second attack. It's the assumption of many people that a second attack would punch through everything, that there'd be a much more explicit assumption of powers.

    TD: And do you believe this?

    Danner: It's quite possible, sure. If it had happened a year after 9/11, I think that's exactly what would have occurred. Now that time has passed, I'm not so sure. They're in a much more defensive political position. It depends on what kind of attack it was, whether it was an attack of a kind that they should have anticipated - that is, one where it was at least conceivable that they should have prevented it.

    It's Not the Information, It's the Politics

    TD: It's always dangerous to predict the future, but can you imagine, in quite another direction, this administration imploding or unraveling?

    Danner: Well, as in so many things, Yogi Berra had it right: I never make predictions, especially about the future. When it comes to raw political power, the ramrod backbone of the administration is clearly national security. 9/11 restored to the Republican Party what they had lost with the end of the Cold War - this persistent advantage in national security. If there is one thing this administration has done brilliantly, ruthlessly, efficiently, it's making political use of its war on terror. It remains to be seen whether they can go to that well one more time in the 2006 election. There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party, exactly because Americans, after four years of it, are tired of this rhetoric and they've been enlightened by the Iraq war, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the Medicare debacle among other things to the general incompetence of the administration and to its corruption.

    Could the administration unravel? The notion many people on the left are putting forward about a move toward impeachment - it's hard for me to imagine that. First of all, we're coming to a point in the political calendar where Democrats, as at the time of Iran-Contra, are not going to want impeachment to get in the way of retaking the White House in 2008. Democrats also saw what impeachment did to the Republican Party in 1998. For the first time in memory in an off-year election in a President's second term, the Republicans lost seats - leading, as you'll remember, to the abrupt fall of Newt Gingrich. On the other hand, if the Democrats did take one house of Congress this November, I think there are a number of areas where an investigation could hurt this administration severely, and it's hard to predict what the Bush people's reaction would be if they found themselves the target of aggressive congressional committees actually investigating officials who faced being charged, convicted, and sent to jail. Even with Congress actually doing its job, we would confront the central political reality of our time: Terrorism has embedded itself in our political system, which is to say that fear has become the most lucrative political emotion and the administration would retain a considerable power to promote fear. It has the power to suggest that an attack on the national security bureaucracy is an attack on the safety of the people.

    TD: I'd like to turn to Iraq now by backing up to an earlier moment in your career, a terrible massacre in El Salvador in the 1980s, whose aftermath you reported on, a massacre by Salvadoran troops trained and backed by the United States. Could you compare that early age of Reagan moment to today, given that so much of the cast of characters has turned out to be the same, including…

    Danner: …Elliott Abrams…

    TD: …and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte, and any number of others. I'd also like you to consider a more general question: How does the U.S. get up to its elbows in blood so regularly?

    Danner: Oh boy… When I look back at the massacre at El Mozote, which happened at the beginning of the Reagan administration, what sticks out is the way it served to signal the renewed determination - of the incoming Reagan officials and the newly defiant Salvadoran military - to draw a line at Salvador and not let that so-called advance of communist interests within the hemisphere continue.

    When I compare now and then, I think of the power of a determined government to deny the facts and, if it is ruthless, to make its denials stick. Because what reverberates now about El Mozote is that two reporters, Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, got to that massacre site within a few weeks and filed stories. These were published on the front pages of the two most powerful newspapers in the country…

    TD: …far more so then than now.

    Danner: Exactly. At a time of real dominance by the Times and Post, and the administration came forward, denied the massacres took place, and was able to make its views stick. And remember we knew that the death squads were being run out of the Salvadoran government; that the American embassy knew all about this; that it was the public policy of the American government that this shouldn't be happening and that aid would be cut off if it was. But every time a new outrage took place, the press obligingly reported the denial of the administration, the denial of the embassy in San Salvador that, in fact, they knew anything about the connection of the death squads and the government the United States was supporting.

    That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the President declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return.

    The Yawning Gap

    TD: Apply this to Iraq. You've been to Iraq three times. It must be startling to arrive in this described land and see the actual country.

    Danner: One of the striking things about going to Iraq is the extraordinarily large chasm between what people know about the story here and what the story actually is. First of all, the lurid, security-imposed landscape of the country is very hard to convey to people here: the miles of concrete blast walls, the miles of barbed wire, the constant fear in driving around and trying to report, and the absolute, constant accompaniment of death. Most of the killings in Iraq are not reported here and yet American viewers think that they're seeing the war when what they're seeing is a television reporter doing a stand-up on the roof of a heavily guarded hotel, behind blast walls and barbed wire and countless armed guards, who may or may not have exited that hotel that day. Many reporters are doing extraordinary jobs under horrific conditions, but those conditions make adequate reporting, as we know it, nearly impossible.

    The result is that the Iraq we see is a tiny, tiny sliver of a very complex, very violent reality, and the constant repetition of the bad news, of the continual deaths there, has been absorbed by the news system of the United States. By that I mean, whereas ten deaths might have made the front page of the paper or been not quote "a tell" but an actual filmed report on a network newscast, now it takes more death than that. The country and the news media are gradually absorbing how badly the war has gone so that the normal pace of death there which, had we predicted it before the war, would have been a horrible outcome - an outcome that, had we known, no one would have supported the war in the first place - this horrible outcome has become the baseline that we take for granted.

    For the story to occupy the news space, a particularly catastrophic attack is necessary. Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on p. A12 of the New York Times. It wasn't even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you're an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans. In fact, the story has generally been migrating off the front pages and becoming a small version of Orwell's famed distant and never-ending war between East Asia and Oceania.

    I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaeda and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.

    TD: You've written, "I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning distance between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable." Now, that yawning gap is available to everybody. And we're in a strangely demobilized moment, it seems to me. I was wondering: If you're a reporter, what's the story now? Remind me?

    Danner: Thank you, Tom, for putting a deeply depressing point in such a deeply depressing way. I congratulate you on that, and indeed that yawning gap is now available to everyone and it's debilitating, partly because one is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn't matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 60s - in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.

    TD: Are we in a kind of Brezhnev moment?

    Danner: I'm not sure I would go so far as that because a Brezhnev moment means we're talking about a system that has reached its geriatric debility. I'm by no means saying that the U.S. now is equivalent to Eastern Europe back then, but there is a similarity in this gap between what you know is true and officially recognized reality - and in the fact that that gap cannot be breached. On the other hand, the fall in Bush's approval ratings, and especially the catastrophic decline in the all-important do-you-think-the-country-is-on-the-right-track question shows that this has had a broad effect among a lot of people. And I take some comfort from that.

    The Democrats are doing very well in a generic poll about who you would want to run the country. This doesn't mean the mid-term elections will turn out that way, of course. It does mean people have not been so dulled by fear as not to see that the war has been a mistake and that the administration has done a very bad job when it comes to, say, Katrina or the Medicare program. At the end of the day, the problem is that there needs to be a political alternative that is in some way viable and believable - and the political elite that opposes this administration has been unable to formulate a believable program in opposition to it.

    At the heart of this is the problem of national security. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in poll after poll the American people say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to protect them. This is a cliché of polling. At this particular time, it's been made worse by a paradox. If, with great skill, the Democrats attack the Republican handling not just of the Iraq war but of the more general war on terror - and the Bush administration has been brilliant in connecting those two - if the Democrats succeed in doing this, they are, in effect, igniting the overwhelming political emotion of fear. And the Republicans have been very successful in using fear; fear, whatever its cause, seems to benefit the Republicans and the self-described strong leadership they offer. Their basic strategy in the 2004 election was to say: Elect this guy Kerry with his surfboard, and he's going to get you killed. Enough people were willing to believe that then. It's unclear whether that old snake oil will still have as many willing buyers. I tend to doubt it.

    TD: As dusk settles in, let me end this way: You've reported on some countries in horrific situations over the years. You wrote somewhere that in State Department parlance they are called TFN, totally f-ked up nations. Your mother, when you come home, has a tendency to say, "Can't you go someplace nice for a change?" So here we are on this patio, the sun going down, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. This looks nice. My question is: Is it nice, or are you now reporting from and teaching in a TFN?

    Danner: [laughs heartily] Oh, you mean, this just a mask, a sunny, picturesque mask over what is, in reality, a totally f-ked up nation? Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN, I think we have a long way to go. We're at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I've certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I've seen nothing like it in my lifetime.

    It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.

    There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal - this, I think, is very tempting… very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.

    You asked a little while ago what reporters should do in a time like this. I think it's immensely important that people continue, with great determination, to report what is true, to investigate things like the NSA story, to make a record of all of this. Because, at the end of the day, that is what reporters do, and that is why their work is so valuable - so, if you'll forgive this word, sacred. They try to tell what actually happened.

    As I leave him at the now dark doorway and head up the stone steps to my car, he calls, "Watch out for the deer! They tend to be up there at this time of night!"

Find the metaphors in this story from the Chicago Tribune...

Hunters: Firing offense by VP
Cheney needs safety refresher course, writes Lew Freedman

Lew Freedman
Published February 14, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney should go back to school.

Several area hunters think Cheney could use a hunter-safety education refresher course after a bizarre incident Saturday in which the vice president shot one of his hunting partners on a quail hunt.

"He broke one of the 10 commandments of hunting," said Westchester hunter Mike Reynolds. "The protocol is that before you pull the trigger, you make sure what the target is and beyond."

This means knowing where your fellow hunters are at all times before firing. Cheney's sin, Reynolds said, was being "oblivious to what was beyond the quail."

Cheney shot a hunting partner on a 50,000-acre ranch in south Texas with a 28-gauge shotgun (at 30 yards or 30 feet, as has been variously stated). That sent Harry Whittington, 78, to the intensive-care unit of a hospital in Corpus Christi with face, chest and neck wounds.

The incident did not become public for 24 hours. Katharine Armstrong, owner of the ranch, said Whittington "got peppered pretty good. It knocked him silly."

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan suggested it was Whittington's fault he was shot for not "notifying others that he was there." However, hunters said it was Cheney's responsibility not to pull the trigger if anyone was at risk.

"The bird gets away," Mike Lauer of Gurnee said. "That's a fact of life. The onus should be on the hunter."

Lauer, a six-year Illinois hunter-safety education instructor, said it sounded as if Whittington was lucky the traveling medical team that follows Cheney (four heart attacks) was on the scene. Even at a distance of 30 yards, with bird shot the hit would pack quite a wallop, Lauer said.

Under Illinois law, anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 1980, must complete a free hunter-safety course before obtaining a hunting license. Older hunters were grandfathered in, Lauer said, but some do sign up. It is critical to always treat a gun as if it is loaded and to always focus not only on a hunting target, but what is beyond, Lauer said.

"I cut out the articles from a couple of newspapers on this," he said. "I use them as real-world stuff that can happen. We get people who have hunted for 40 years and they don't think they can learn something from the class. They say, `That will never happen.' Then it happens."

Bob Becker, 75, of Godfrey, president of the Illinois Federation for Outdoor Resources, has hunted for 56 years and been shot with pellets from a distance.

"They hurt and they stung," he said, "but they didn't do any real damage. It's so easy to happen when everybody doesn't stay focused on where everybody is. [Cheney's incident] is where hunter-safety education courses come to the forefront. It's so important to the younger people, and us older people can use a reminder."

Longtime hunters say scenarios like that of Cheney focusing in on a quail and overlooking one of his hunting partners can occur in the wild.

"I almost did that to a guy one time," said Ron Koch, from Omro, Wis., who said the near-accident was about 25 years ago while he was pheasant hunting. "I saw him just in time. I don't care how old you are, you can never be too careful with a gun."

States generally have strict policies about timely reporting of hunting incidents. Any incident that results in death or serious injury from a firearm or bow and arrow must be reported to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources within five days. The form, which can be printed out from the agency's Web site, includes a checklist of possible injuries by body part.

No one said Cheney should have been fingerprinted and booked (Secret Service agents were on the scene), but Reynolds and Lauer theorized the 24-hour silence in Texas was because everyone present wanted to get their story straight.

"They put their heads together to make him not look like an idiot," Reynolds said.

 

As you can see, this is statement made in the U.S. Senate by Russ Feigold, the Senator from Wisconsin. If, like me, you've been discouraged by the willingness of elected Democrats to cave-in to the Bush administration on crucial matters of principle, you may want to pay attention to Sen. Feingold. He is increasingly outspoken. Forget Hillary (please!). I think Feingold's a contender in '08.

    On the President's Warrantless Wiretapping Program
    By Senator Russ Feingold
   

    Tuesday 07 February 2006
As prepared for delivery from the Senate floor.

    Mr. President, last week the President of the United States gave his State of the Union address, where he spoke of America's leadership in the world, and called on all of us to "lead this world toward freedom." Again and again, he invoked the principle of freedom, and how it can transform nations, and empower people around the world.

    But, almost in the same breath, the President openly acknowledged that he has ordered the government to spy on Americans, on American soil, without the warrants required by law.

    The President issued a call to spread freedom throughout the world, and then he admitted that he has deprived Americans of one of their most basic freedoms under the Fourth Amendment - to be free from unjustified government intrusion.

    The President was blunt. He said that he had authorized the NSA's domestic spying program, and he made a number of misleading arguments to defend himself. His words got rousing applause from Republicans, and I think even some Democrats.

    The President was blunt, so I will be blunt: This program is breaking the law, and this President is breaking the law. Not only that, he is misleading the American people in his efforts to justify this program.

    How is that worthy of applause? Since when do we celebrate our commander in chief for violating our most basic freedoms, and misleading the American people in the process? When did we start to stand up and cheer for breaking the law? In that moment at the State of the Union, I felt ashamed.

    Congress has lost its way if we don't hold this President accountable for his actions.

    The President suggests that anyone who criticizes his illegal wiretapping program doesn't understand the threat we face. But we do. Every single one of us is committed to stopping the terrorists who threaten us and our families.

    Defeating the terrorists should be our top national priority, and we all agree that we need to wiretap them to do it. In fact, it would be irresponsible not to wiretap terrorists. But we have yet to see any reason why we have to trample the laws of the United States to do it. The President's decision that he can break the law says far more about his attitude toward the rule of law than it does about the laws themselves.

    This goes way beyond party, and way beyond politics. What the President has done here is to break faith with the American people. In the State of the Union, he also said that "we must always be clear in our principles" to get support from friends and allies that we need to fight terrorism. So let's be clear about a basic American principle: When someone breaks the law, when someone misleads the public in an attempt to justify his actions, he needs to be held accountable. The President of the United States has broken the law. The President of the United States is trying to mislead the American people. And he needs to be held accountable.

    Unfortunately, the President refuses to provide any details about this domestic spying program. Not even the full Intelligence committees know the details, and they were specifically set up to review classified information and oversee the intelligence activities of our government. Instead, the President says - "Trust me."

    This is not the first time we've heard that. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Administration went on an offensive to get the American public, the Congress, and the international community to believe its theory that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and even that he had ties to Al Qaeda. The President painted a dire - and inaccurate - picture of Saddam Hussein's capability and intent, and we invaded Iraq on that basis. To make matters worse, the Administration misled the country about what it would take to stabilize and reconstruct Iraq after the conflict. We were led to believe that this was going to be a short endeavor, and that our troops would be home soon.

    We all recall the President's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003. In fact, the mission was not even close to being complete. More than 2100 total deaths have occurred after the President declared an end to major combat operations in May of 2003, and over 16,600 American troops have been wounded in Iraq. The President misled the American people and grossly miscalculated the true challenge of stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq.

    In December, we found out that the President has authorized wiretaps of Americans without the court orders required by law. He says he is only wiretapping people with links to terrorists, but how do we know? We don't. The President is unwilling to let a neutral judge make sure that is the case. He will not submit this program to an independent branch of government to make sure he's not violating the rights of law-abiding Americans.

    So I don't want to hear again that this Administration has shown it can be trusted. It hasn't. And that is exactly why the law requires a judge to review these wiretaps.

    It is up to Congress to hold the President to account. We held a hearing on the domestic spying program in the Judiciary Committee yesterday, where Attorney General Gonzales was a witness. We expect there will be other hearings. That is a start, but it will take more than just hearings to get the job done.

    We know that in part because the President's Attorney General has already shown a willingness to mislead the Congress.

    At the hearing yesterday, I reminded the Attorney General about his testimony during his confirmation hearings in January 2005, when I asked him whether the President had the power to authorize warrantless wiretaps in violation of the criminal law. We didn't know it then, but the President had authorized the NSA program three years before, when the Attorney General was White House Counsel. At his confirmation hearing, the Attorney General first tried to dismiss my question as "hypothetical." He then testified that "it's not the policy or the agenda of this President to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."

    Well, Mr. President, wiretapping American citizens on American soil without the required warrant is in direct contravention of our criminal statutes. The Attorney General knew that, and he knew about the NSA program when he sought the Senate's approval for his nomination to be Attorney General. He wanted the Senate and the American people to think that the President had not acted on the extreme legal theory that the President has the power as Commander in Chief to disobey the criminal laws of this country. But he had. The Attorney General had some explaining to do, and he didn't do it yesterday. Instead he parsed words, arguing that what he said was truthful because he didn't believe that the President's actions violated the law.

    But he knew what I was asking, and he knew he was misleading the Committee in his response. If he had been straightforward, he would have told the committee that in his opinion, the President has the authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps. My question wasn't about whether such illegal wiretapping was going on - like almost everyone in Congress, I didn't know about the program then. It was a question about how the nominee to be Attorney General viewed the law. This nominee wanted to be confirmed, and so he let a misleading statement about one of the central issues of his confirmation - his view of executive power - stay on the record until the New York Times revealed the program.

    The rest of the Attorney General's performance at yesterday's hearing certainly did not give me any comfort, either. He continued to push the Administration's weak legal arguments, continued to insinuate that anyone who questions this program doesn't want to fight terrorism, and refused to answer basic questions about what powers this Administration is claiming. We still need a lot of answers from this Administration.

    But let's put aside the Attorney General for now. The burden is not just on him to come clean - the President has some explaining to do. The President's defense of his actions is deeply cynical, deeply misleading, and deeply troubling.

    To find out that the President of the United States has violated the basic rights of the American people is chilling. And then to see him publicly embrace his actions - and to see so many Members of Congress cheer him on - is appalling.

    The President has broken the law, and he has made it clear that he will continue to do so. But the President is not a king. And the Congress is not a king's court. Our job is not to stand up and cheer when the President breaks the law. Our job is to stand up and demand accountability, to stand up and check the power of an out-of-control executive branch.

    That is one of the reasons that the framers put us here - to ensure balance between the branches of government, not to act as a professional cheering section.

    We need answers. Because no one, not the President, not the Attorney General, and not any of their defenders in this body, has been able to explain why it is necessary to break the law to defend against terrorism. And I think that's because they can't explain it.

    Instead, this administration reacts to anyone who questions this illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and stand up for our rights and freedoms have a pre-9/11 view of the world.

    In fact, the President has a pre-1776 view of the world.

    Our Founders lived in dangerous times, and they risked everything for freedom. Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." The President's pre-1776 mentality is hurting America. It is fracturing the foundation on which our country has stood for 230 years. The President can't just bypass two branches of government, and obey only those laws he wants to obey. Deciding unilaterally which of our freedoms still apply in the fight against terrorism is unacceptable and needs to be stopped immediately.

    Let's examine for a moment some of the President's attempts to defend his actions. His arguments have changed over time, of course. They have to - none of them hold up under even casual scrutiny, so he can't rely on one single explanation. As each argument crumbles beneath him, he moves on to a new one, until that, too, is debunked, and on and on he goes.

    In the State of the Union, the President referred to Presidents in American history who cited executive authority to order warrantless surveillance. But of course those past presidents - like Wilson and Roosevelt - were acting before the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that our communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, and before Congress decided in 1978 that the executive branch can no longer unilaterally decide which Americans to wiretap. The Attorney General yesterday was unable to give me one example of a President who, since 1978 when FISA was passed, has authorized warrantless wiretaps outside of FISA.

    So that argument is baseless, and it's deeply troubling that the President of the United States would so obviously mislead the Congress and American public. That hardly honors the founders' idea that the President should address the Congress on the state of our union.

    The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 to create a secret court, made up of judges who develop national security expertise, to issue warrants for surveillance of terrorists and spies. These are the judges from whom the Bush Administration has obtained thousands of warrants since 9/11. The Administration has almost never had a warrant request rejected by those judges. They have used the FISA Court thousands of times, but at the same time they assert that FISA is an "old law" or "out of date" and they can't comply with it. Clearly they can and do comply with it - except when they don't. Then they just arbitrarily decide to go around these judges, and around the law.

    The Administration has said that it ignored FISA because it takes too long to get a warrant under that law. But we know that in an emergency, where the Attorney General believes that surveillance must begin before a court order can be obtained, FISA permits the wiretap to be executed immediately as long as the government goes to the court within 72 hours. The Attorney General has complained that the emergency provision does not give him enough flexibility, he has complained that getting a FISA application together or getting the necessary approvals takes too long. But the problems he has cited are bureaucratic barriers that the executive branch put in place, and could easily remove if it wanted.

    FISA also permits the Attorney General to authorize unlimited warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States during the 15 days following a declaration of war, to allow time to consider any amendments to FISA required by a wartime emergency. That is the time period that Congress specified. Yet the President thinks that he can do this indefinitely.

    In the State of the Union, the President also argued that federal courts had approved the use of presidential authority that he was invoking. But that turned out to be misleading as well. When I asked the Attorney General about this, he could point me to no court - not the Supreme Court or any other court - that has considered whether, after FISA was enacted, the President nonetheless had the authority to bypass it and authorize warrantless wiretaps. Not one court. The Administration's effort to find support for what it has done in snippets of other court decisions would be laughable if this issue were not so serious.

    The President knows that FISA makes it a crime to wiretap Americans in the United States without a warrant or a court order. Why else would he have assured the public, over and over again, that he was getting warrants before engaging in domestic surveillance?

    Here's what the President said on April 20, 2004: "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

    And again, on July 14, 2004: "The government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order."

    The President was understandably eager in these speeches to make it clear that under his administration, law enforcement was using the FISA Court to obtain warrants before wiretapping. That is understandable, since wiretapping Americans on American soil without a warrant is against the law.

    And listen to what the President said on June 9, 2005: "Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the US"

    Now that the public knows about the domestic spying program, he has had to change course. He has looked around for arguments to cloak his actions. And all of them are completely threadbare.

    The President has argued that Congress gave him authority to wiretap Americans on US soil without a warrant when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force after September 11, 2001. Mr. President, that is ridiculous. Members of Congress did not think this resolution gave the President blanket authority to order these warrantless wiretaps. We all know that. Anyone in this body who would tell you otherwise either wasn't here at the time or isn't telling the truth. We authorized the President to use military force in Afghanistan, a necessary and justified response to September 11. We did not authorize him to wiretap American citizens on American soil without going through the process that was set up nearly three decades ago precisely to facilitate the domestic surveillance of terrorists - with the approval of a judge. That is why both Republicans and Democrats have questioned this theory.

    This particular claim is further undermined by congressional approval of the Patriot Act just a few weeks after we passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The Patriot Act made it easier for law enforcement to conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists and spies, while maintaining FISA's baseline requirement of judicial approval for wiretaps of Americans in the US It is ridiculous to think that Congress would have negotiated and enacted all the changes to FISA in the Patriot Act if it thought it had just authorized the President to ignore FISA in the AUMF.

    In addition, in the intelligence authorization bill passed in December 2001, we extended the emergency authority in FISA, at the Administration's request, from 24 to 72 hours. Why do that if the President has the power to ignore FISA? That makes no sense at all.

    The President has also said that his inherent executive power gives him the power to approve this program. But here the President is acting in direct violation of a criminal statute. That means his power is, as Justice Jackson said in the steel seizure cases half a century ago, "at its lowest ebb." A recent letter from a group of law professors and former executive branch officials points out that "every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting the Commander-in-Chief's authority, it has upheld the statute." The Senate reports issued when FISA was enacted confirm the understanding that FISA overrode any pre-existing inherent authority of the President. As the 1978 Senate Judiciary Committee report stated, FISA "recognizes no inherent power of the president in this area." And "Congress has declared that this statute, not any claimed presidential power, controls." Contrary to what the President told the country in the State of the Union, no court has ever approved warrantless surveillance in violation of FISA.

    The President's claims of inherent executive authority, and his assertions that the courts have approved this type of activity, are baseless.

    The President has argued that periodic internal executive branch review provides an adequate check on the program. He has even characterized this periodic review as a safeguard for civil liberties. But we don't know what this check involves. And we do know that Congress explicitly rejected this idea of unilateral executive decision-making in this area when it passed FISA.

    Finally, the president has tried to claim that informing a handful of congressional leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, somehow excuses breaking the law. Of course, several of these members said they weren't given the full story. And all of them were prohibited from discussing what they were told. So the fact that they were informed under these extraordinary circumstances does not constitute congressional oversight, and it most certainly does not constitute congressional approval of the program. Indeed, it doesn't even comply with the National Security Act, which requires the entire memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee to be "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States."

    In addition, we now know that some of these members expressed concern about the program. The Administration ignored their protests. Just last week, one of the eight members of Congress who has been briefed about the program, Congresswoman Jane Harman, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she sees no reason why the Administration cannot accomplish its goals within the law as currently written.

    None of the President's arguments explains or excuses his conduct, or the NSA's domestic spying program. Not one. It is hard to believe that the President has the audacity to claim that they do. It is a strategy that really hinges on the credibility of the office of the Presidency itself. If you just insist that you didn't break the law, you haven't broken the law. It reminds me of what Richard Nixon said after he had left office: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal." But that is not how our constitutional democracy works. Making those kinds of arguments is damaging the credibility of the Presidency.

    And what's particularly disturbing is how many members of Congress have responded. They stood up and cheered. They stood up and cheered.

    Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

    The President's actions are indefensible. Freedom is an enduring principle. It is not something to celebrate in one breath, and ignore the next. Freedom is at the heart of who we are as a nation, and as a people. We cannot be a beacon of freedom for the world unless we protect our own freedoms here at home.

    The President was right about one thing. In his address, he said "We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it."

    Yes, Mr. President. We do love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it. We will fight to defeat the terrorists who threaten the safety and security of our families and loved ones. And we will fight to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans against intrusive government power.

    As the President said, we must always be clear in our principles. So let us be clear: We cherish the great and noble principle of freedom, we will fight to keep it, and we will hold this President - and anyone who violates those freedoms - accountable for their actions. In a nation built on freedom, the President is not a king, and no one is above the law.

    I yield the floor.

 

This copy comes courtesy of Save the Dunes in Northwest Indiana. This is the sort of "growth" that we're up against...

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility News Release
(www.peer.org)

For Immediate Release: February 2, 2006
Contact: Chas Offutt (202) 265-7337

LAWSUIT TO FIND INDUSTRY IMPETUS BEHIND PARK POLICY REWRITE - Group
Seeks Lobbying Letters and Other Communications with Bush Officials

Washington, DC - The U.S. Department of Interior is refusing to turn
over industry lobbying efforts leading up to a Bush administration
proposed rewrite of National Park Service policies to favor commercial
uses over preservation of park resources, according to a lawsuit filed
in federal district court today by Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility (PEER). The PEER suit, filed under the Freedom of
Information Act, notes that Interior officials have stalled record
requests for four months and have not cited any reason to withhold
copies of its exchanges with industry lobbyists.

This past August, Paul Hoffman, a former Dick Cheney aide occupying a
top Interior Department slot overseeing the Park Service, circulated a
total make-over of all the Management Policies governing the national
park system. The Hoffman draft set off a furor, as it appeared to give
dirt bikes, off-highway vehicles, and jet skis wide access to scores of
national parks and seashores. Mining, grazing, helicopter tours,
cell-phone towers and even rock concerts, would all have been
encouraged, as park superintendents would have to show there would be
permanent resource damage in order to block any requested use.

Hoffman claimed that he was trying to make park policies less
"anti-enjoyment." In a September speech to a recreation industry group,
Hoffman said he "received a clear message from many constituencies"
that a revision of the National Park Service's Management Policies was
necessary because of their "evident bias in favor of preservation of
the park system over human use and enjoyment."

"Which constituencies sent Paul Hoffman the clear message that national
parks should no longer be so protective of nature?" asked PEER General
Counsel Richard Condit who filed the complaint in the U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia. "We are simply trying to determine
which lobbyists are really behind the new Bush administration park
policies."

Opposition was so widespread to Hoffman's original draft that the Bush
administration withdrew it but by October it unveiled a new version
that was immediately dubbed "Hoffman-lite" in that it omitted some of
the more egregious aspects of the earlier draft but the drift was the
same. The Interior Department claimed its new version had the input of
one hundred Park Service managers but was unable to identify a single
one in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from media.

This new version of the Park Service Management Policy rewrite is
subject to public comment until February 18th (the original December
deadline that was extended at Congressional request). The proposed
changes tell managers they must balance nature against an array of
commercial, recreational and social uses. Critics charge that in scores
of subtle wording changes, natural resource protections would be
weakened, but never strengthened -
Rules prohibiting industrial air pollution from beclouding park
vistas would be unenforceable;
Millions of acres of potential wilderness in park backcountry
could be carved with trails, roads and other developments;
Values such as "peace and tranquility" and protection of "natural
soundscapes" are jettisoned to allow proliferation of cell phone
towers and greater snowmobile and other motorized access.

"We know that Hoffman and his political patron, Vice-President Cheney,
both have penchants for closed- door meetings with industry lawyers and
lobbyists to set administration policy," Condit added. "By law, the
public has a right to know what business is conducted in its name, in
this case, who Hoffman and his staff met with and what was said."

This piece, from The Guardian in the UK, begins an important discussion about the costs of believing in that a successful economy, by definition, is all about growth...it includes an interesting p.s. about family values in Italy.

    Winds of Climate Change Are about to Make Their Impact Felt in Many a Boardroom
    By Larry Elliott
    The Guardian UK

    Monday 06 February 2006
Top science adviser sounds death knell for theory that insists growth is good.

    The old economics is dead. Its death knell was sounded last week, not by a practitioner of the dismal science but by Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser. Sir David King said concentrations of greenhouse gases were already at a level where the warning signs were flashing red: a comment that starkly illustrates the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.

    Economics is a discipline in which the factors of production - capital and labour - are supposed to be harnessed to maximise production at the cheapest price. By this yardstick, an economy is doing twice as well if it is growing at 4% rather than 2% and disastrously badly if consumers are not in the shops from dawn till dusk. Globalisation is seen as the ultimate form of a market economy, according to the prevailing model, because a more efficient use of the factors of production leads to lower prices and therefore permits higher levels of consumption. In a globalised world, you're only as good as your last GDP number.

    But think about it for a minute. Concerns are frequently being raised about the fact that many developed countries are about to see - or are already seeing - a decline in their populations. This will have an impact on their trend rate of growth, which is a function of population and productivity. Stories about falling population are always couched in terms of demographic time bombs, suggesting that they are clearly a bad thing. But fewer people in Germany, Italy or Japan will mean more space, less pressure on resources and a more pleasant life.

    Take another example. Globalisation has meant clothes in the UK are cheap. The inflation figures show that women's outerwear is less expensive now than it was in the late 1980s. And we're not talking about the inflation-adjusted price either; the average sterling price of a skirt or a dress is lower than it was two decades ago.

    There's no longer the need to wear a top several times to get your money's worth: they can be worn once and tossed in the bin. Likewise, stores now sell jeans at below £5 a pair and market them to manual workers on the basis that if they get them filthy in the course of a week they can simply throw them away and buy anew. According to the present model of economics, this is progress, just as it is to be welcomed that flights as low as £2.50 mean stag and hen weekends in Tallinn or Prague.

    But are these developments really positive? Orthodox economics says they are, because they raise the real incomes of consumers. But, according to Sir David's analysis, they are potentially very bad indeed. Currently, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are around 380 parts per million, compared with around 220 ppm during the last ice age. Climatologists estimate that 400ppm - of thereabouts - is the tipping point and if we push concentrations much above that the process of climate change could become irreversible.

    Seduced

    Sir David says climate change is a threat to our civilisation, and he's right about that. There is no cast-iron guarantee that societies - no matter how smart or technologically advanced - persist. Think of the Romans in the last days before the collapse of the empire ushered in the Dark Ages. But Sir David thinks it is unrealistic to limit concentrations to the levels that scientists say would be safe. He thinks about 550 ppm is the limit and, sadly, given the current configuration of politics - domestically and globally - he is probably right about that too.

    One problem is that as individuals we lack the incentives to do the sensible thing. If you are seduced by the idea of a cut-price flight, you get 100% of the benefit but only assume a tiny fraction of the cost to the environment. Another problem is that we lack the institutional framework for coping with climate change; instead, we have national governments fearful of doing anything that would damage international competitiveness. A more damaging mindset you could not hope to find, since it sends out the clear message that action on the environment comes a long way second to policies that foster growth.

    The attempt in Britain to have our cake and eat it will mean - almost inevitably - that the government goes ahead with its plan to build more nuclear power stations. The expertise of John Browne, the chief executive of BP, is interesting here, though. Browne says that building enough capacity to deliver seven gigawatts of energy could put a ceiling on emissions at around 500 ppm. That doesn't sound much, but one gigawatt is the equivalent of 700 nuclear power stations. That's a heck of a lot of nukes, and by the time we've built them rising sea levels may mean they're a few feet under water. At the very best, it will mean that the lights stay on in the UK as darkness descends in the rest of the world.

    Nor will the technical solution to climate change be feasible unless governments use their power to change behaviour. That means tougher building regulations, emission controls that force car manufacturers to get serious about vehicles that don't run on petrol, a range of new economic indicators that look beyond traditional methods of assessing growth, subsidies for environmental industries. The argument that business would not be able to cope with curbs on greenhouse gases is a fallacy; the longevity of capitalism is due almost entirely to its ability to adapt to any regime. What business lacks now is a clear steer; it has the expertise.

    Peet Osta, the author of The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations, puts it this way: "Once government at all levels commits to purchasing clean technologies, making efficiency improvements, and using alternative energy where possible, this massive spending would provide economies of scale that would help speed the commercialisation of new technologies as well as prepare society for the shift away from fossil fuels. Such proposals have been on the table since the early 1960s. By not taking action on greenhouse emissions, we are betting our wellbeing that climate change poses little threat. If we are wrong, we will meet our fate."

    Unleashing

    Governments are almost certainly wrong to believe that action on climate change means economic stagnation. On the contrary, it would probably lead to an unleashing of a new clean industrial revolution based on green technology. They are also wrong to believe that the Kyoto process - rather than a new, comprehensive global solution - is the way to cut carbon emissions in any meaningful way.

    If the initiative does not come from governments, it may eventually come from business itself. In particular, the insurance industry sees itself facing ruin if climate change leads to more hurricanes on the scale of Katrina. The executives of companies in the US have what is known as directors' - and officers' - insurance, which indemnifies them against lawsuits arising from their companies' actions. But they are going to be very wary indeed about writing insurance for companies that are at risk from lawsuits arising from climate change.

    Exxon Mobil looks vulnerable in this respect. It accounts for around 1% of carbon emissions globally but has lobbied long and hard against efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions. Christopher Walker, head of the greenhouse gas risk solutions unit at Swiss Re, says his company may be forced to approach Exxon Mobil and say: "Since you don't think climate change is a problem, and you're betting your stockholders' assets on that, we're sure you won't mind if we exclude climate-related lawsuits from your D&O insurance." That sort of talk, you can be sure, tends to concentrate minds in the boardroom.

    Mamma May Not Know Best

    The myth of Italian men being mamma's boys is not such a myth after all, it appears. Where five out of every 10 men in Britain aged between 18 and 30 live with their parents, in Italy eight out of 10 men in the 18-30 group are expected home for a bowl of pasta every night.

    It has been assumed that Italian parents are simply being altruistic: they allow their offspring to stay at home because they are unemployed or moving from one lowly paid, insecure job to another.

    Research published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics suggests an alternative explanation; the Italians love having their children around them so much that they are prepared to bribe them to stay at home.

    The study showed that an increase of 10% in the parents' income resulted in a 10% increase in the proportion of children living at home: the authors of the study, Marco Manacorda at Queen Mary College and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley, say Italians give money to their children in the hope that they will stick around. Many do, but it is the cohabitation - paradoxically - that leads to higher youth unemployment because the children have less incentive to make their own way in the labour market.