Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
The WMCN benefit at the 400 Bar tonight was excellent, although I only got there in time to see Short Order. Mitch sported sunglasses... I'm real tired now, but I watched the overnight cable broadcasts regarding Iraq, which sounded better than I might have expected. Massive violence over the past 4 hours, almost a dozen suicide bombs, yet the people are apparently turning out in many places. I don't know what it will sound like by the time I wake up in the morning. Of course, the real fireworks might come when they try to move the ballots. Who knows...
For all this lying and violence, well at least they got to have some polls. Some came from Bulgaria to Turkey to vote, according to CNN.
The highlight of the broadcasts was at about 1:59 central time. Two Iraqi dudes were telling FOX News about coming from Utah to vote in California, and they started to describe how another Iraqi at the polling station was wearing black because their relative got killed working in the Iraqi National Guard, and then the anchor suddenly cut them off. Time for the 2 AM commercial break!!!
What product so immediately needed to be offered to us? A collection of cowboy classics. John Wayne. Buy it now and git double the episodes, only nanntenn nannty fiiive plus shippin' and handlin'.
Norm Rosenberg taught us about the John Wayne movie Red River. Wayne rides into the west, gits some land, shoots the representative of the land's owner, and connects the cattle generated to the American economy, represented by a railway. He didn't have time to hear the end of any damn stories, either.
Ironically, there was only one polling station open in the western United States, and we'll see how many stations in western Iraq make it through the day.
Ongoing news coverage:
Al Jazeera - although they got officially kicked out
Agonist.org - online news collectors. top notch folks.
The early report from Dexter Filkins of the Times.
Something will turn up on Metafilter.
My regards to anyone who tries to brave the situation, and my sympathy for those that already know its a slanted game. Hang on folks, this is the part where 2 + 2 just gotta equal 5.
Well, I have been going at this for a couple weeks now, and school officially starts today. The big concentration of interviews is mostly over with, but they've piled up to profile quickly. This entry is intended to as a way to console myself that I've already gotten a large chunk done, because by God it doesn't yet feel that way.
So here's the list of Minnesota legislators I've interviewed, and profiles I've written:
Interviewed but haven't written profiles:
Senators:
Representatives:
Profiles completed:
Senators:
Representatives:
Ugh, unfortunately I'm not quite on top of writing these damn things. But I'm getting there...
Starting Monday morning at 10, it's time for Senators Mee Moua (DFL-67) and Ellen Anderson (DFL-66), Reps. Michael Nelson (R-46A), Ruth Johnson (DFL-23) and Fran Bradley (R-29B).
I started a Wiki page for PoliticsInMinnesota info.
Hurray for final semester at Macalester! Yahoooo! I'm going to bed. My wrists are tired as hell from typing... Hah, it seems like I might have found the fix for the server's date sliding problem, finally. Or not. Time will tell.
The website has had rather intermittent service lately, and for that I'm sorry. Among all this new job stuff I have been trying to solve the bizarre date-reset problem, and I think I finally have it licked. In Webmin I disabled some kind of clock syncing between the system time and the hardware time... this is a Linux thing that I don't quite fully understand, but now that the syncing has been turned off, the computer should be able to keep time accurately from now on and it won't puzzle me anymore.
The reason that this garbage pertains to the website is that when the clock would go back to 1901, it would think that the HongPong.com front page should have every post on it. Very annoying.
Also I tried to fiddle around a little bit with installing Squid, a proxy cache program that would make my site run quite a bit faster, as it holds in RAM the most frequently downloaded files, while Apache tends to have to read them from disk over and over. This can make a server dozens of times quicker, in some situations. However, as is so often the case with Linux stuff, the documentation to set up a 'reverse proxy for a local server' as i think the terminology goes, is pretty hard to find and incomplete. If it was easy, you'd be proxied right now. Oh well.
Other than that..... I have to write about 8 profiles tonight or else my boss might have an aneurism, or else have to buy another pack of cigarettes, so back to it!
A brief break from writing profiles of Minnesota state House and Senate members for the book. I bring you a bit of the past and future wreckage of the Bush3 Administration... Also I have been sort of out of the loop on my usual things this week. Dan Schwartz sent me the Sy Hersh story that I totally missed, and for that I thank him.
If you ever wanted evidence that the Pentagon is a pathologically destructive force bent on destroying the past, present and future of the planet simultaneously, here you go. From the Beginning:
US-led troops using the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon as a base have damaged and contaminated artifacts dating back thousands of years in one of the most important archeological sites in the world, the British Museum said yesterday.
Military vehicles crushed a 2,600-year-old brick pavement, for example, and archeological fragments, including broken bricks stamped by King Nebuchadnezzar II around the same time, were scattered across the site, a museum report said.
The dragons at the Ishtar Gate were marred by cracks and gaps where someone tried to remove their decorative bricks, the paper said.
John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum's Near East department, who was invited by Iraqis to study the site, also found that large quantities of sand mixed with archeological fragments have been taken from the site to fill military sandbags.
''This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," Curtis said in the report.
In an interview yesterday with Associated Press Television News, Iraq's minister of culture, Mufeed al-Jazairee, said coalition troops in Babylon had used ''armored vehicles and helicopters that land and take off freely. In addition to that, the forces also set up other facilities and changes."
He added, ''I expect that the archeological city of Babylon has sustained damage, but I don't know exactly the size of such damage."
[....]
In the report, Curtis acknowledged that at first the US presence had helped to protect the site from looters.
But subsequent work, including the decision to cover large areas of the site with gravel brought in from elsewhere to provide parking lots and heliports, was damaging, he said.
Lord Redesdale, an archeologist who heads a parliamentary archeology committee, described the report's findings as ''just dreadful."
''Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archeology of Iraq, it's actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world," he said.
For more than 1,000 years, Babylon was one of the world's premier cities, where King Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Meanwhile Seymour Hersh has a whole barrel of info for us about the planned unleashing of the Pentagon to 'prepare the battle space' around Iran. "Prepare the battle space" was one of my favorite creepy euphemisms for the strategic bombing campaigns they undertook just before the invasion of Iraq.
Ah yes, the weapons of mass destruction were never found. So why did Fallujah become an all-important social engineering project by force? Was the intent of this circus to demonstrate national will rather than secure the U.S. from actually dangerous materials? Yeah, of course it was. But it had something to do with Iran too. Before the war we were apparently going to use Iran against Saudi Arabia (yes, that seems to be why we marched into the Mesopotamian mousetrap) but now it's all gone to hell, and yet another brilliant scheme is At Hand.
Anyhow back to Hersh: the Bush Administration intends to attack the Iranian nuclear project complexes, and in fact has been running covert operations within Iran for quite a while. Also Defense Undersecretary of Batshit Madness Douglas Feith (not to be confused with Undersecretary of Fanatical Crusaderism William Boykin) is closely coordinating with the Israeli military to figure out which things to try and blow up.
Clearly this is yet another scheme which will unfold perfectly and only involve propaganda that isn't designed to mislead the American public. These are serious people here....
I thought that I would have some more stories for you today but I feel that this stuff is big enough to justify its own post. Yes, the national security state we all know and love is reconstituting itself in a new and more uncontrolled form. This is an exceedingly dangerous problem for those of us living Inside the Asylum.
I also saw some stories about how the Pentagon is going to conduct its own preemptive intelligence covert wars, operations, whatever the hell you call it these days. In this article it is called 'black reconnaissance' as a way of distancing it from the beloved old CIA label of 'covert operations.' Read Mr. Hersh... Sy, I'm sorry I quoted like half your story, but this one is too important not to enter into the record:
The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degre unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—durin his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one governmen consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
[....]
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
[....]
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief.
[....]
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
[.....]
There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”
[...]
The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me. [....] The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.
[....]
There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)
“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.
The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.
[....]
The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.
“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”
[.....]
Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)
Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings.
Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. [and they're fucking crazy -- Dan]
[.....]
“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”
[....]
In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities.
[....]
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”
[....]
There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray.
[....]
“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.
“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it."
A Summary: Straight from the Rambling Periphery to the Talkative Core
On Wednesday I quit Computer Zone Consulting and suspended my job at the library because I got a paid internship with an organization putting together a huge directory of the politicians in the state of Minnesota. This has chomped up all my time, and I won't have nearly the time to write on the site for probably about a month. Therefore some of those in Hongistan could perhaps offer a few tidbits to help keep us goin? And is it possible that Dan is working for.... a Republican??!!? More below...
An offer of 'Big Propz':
First of all, megadittoes to Nick for his quite clear and not at all spin-laden look at the social security mess. It does sound like a Ponzi scheme designed to help financial industry insiders shift giant mountains of government cash around to generate the appearance of prosperity, another great step forward in the Faith-Based Economy of the 21st Century.
In the field of major news, things have abruptly changed for me this week. Unexpectedly, last Friday Peter Gartrell got me a job with Politics in Minnesota, an organization which publishes a directory of all the legislators and key officers in the state. My job, which I've chosen to accept, is to go around and interview about a third of the state legislature, so that I can write their updated profiles for this term. It is a very challenging project, and the deadline is rolling around obscenely quickly.
On Wednesday I talked with a bunch of Republican representatives, and I was surprised to find that they were strong supporters of renewable energy, new state rail transit solutions and other kinds of policies that I think are quite important. It's a very new sort of thing for me, to say the least. I have had improbable talks with quite a few Republicans in my day, but I've never had to deal with multiple (R) representatives in a mere afternoon. Here, I'm trying my best to be professional about the whole undertaking, but it helps that I've been sort of indifferent to most of state politics for quite a while. Not reading the Star Tribune daily for a while really tamped it down...
Not a Likely Situation for Dan:
Well, the really ironic twist is that the publisher of this political Directory is one Sarah Janecek, a Republican lobbyist who's widely known and heard from in state media. She has only been around a little bit this week due to a business trip, but she is definitely one of the most interesting and informed people around these parts that I've ever dealt with. She's been telling some folks that Peter and I are her "Macalester liberal interns," which greatly amused some Senate Republicans. However, keep in mind that the whole operation has bi-partisan leadership, as associate publishers Blois Olson and David Erickson are DFLers.
So we've sort of been slotted into this little ideological gap where things look quite different than before. Essentially my role is first to prod the legislators into talking about themselves, their accomplishments in the last term, their policy interests and what they want to look at in this next term. As you might imagine, it is not insanely hard to get them to talk about themselves. Then I've got to write up or adjust the "analysis" section of their profile from last year, and send it in to get edited. I was a little nervous to get started on this, but my schedule has gone mad.
I've got to write stuff that reflects what the legislators want to see in the book, their basic story and situation as they see it, and has some kind of interesting zing to it. This does not require me to have an opinion about whether or not I support their positions. Just roughly 2,500 characters of text that would help illustrate to the interested everyday Joe just who their elected officials really are.
It does require me to get up ridiculously early in the morning. Real early. Ouch. It also eats up most of my time. As luck would have it, Arthur Cheng showed up in town during my first day running around the State Capitol. A shrewd operator in the field of economics is just who I need to help me sort it out at the beginning. So now I'm off to the races.....
Oh by the way, the Supreme Court o' the U.S. itself finally scratched the Hudson casino. Thank God.
Because of all this new internship stuff, I just can't spend much time working on posts here. It's too bad, I was hoping to put out some interesting information and weird links that I've linked to in the HongWiki, but haven't had the time nor inclination to further organize. Go to "Recent Changes" in there, and look at the various date entries like "8 January 2005." I guarantee you will find something interesting, though not necessarily truthful.
A Call to Rambling on the Internet:
So again I want to thank Nick for putting some excellent stuff together, but now I want to ask some other folks if they are interested in writing some guest posts for Shits and Giggles. Namely folks like A. Henry "Big Sky" Tweeten, Dan "what's all this now" Schwartz, Kellen "I live in Kirk 911, isn't that disconcerting in a postmodern apocalypse kind of way" Anfinson and the Gerberuses.
Of course there are a lot of other people who might be reading (or not), but those are just the cats that spring to mind right now. I am hoping we can get a few things going. I'm not even hoping for longer pieces of writing. Just a few paragraphs on the DNC race or what you've been hearing about lately would be extremely welcome.
In a final tidbit, something went a little weird with the date setting on the HongPong.com server over the last week or so. It kept setting back to 1901, although I don't quite know why, and haven't had the time to figure it out. I rebooted the server after a quite good 111 days of uptime, with a load average of 1.84 / 1.28 / 1.17. What does load average mean? Something to do with idle cycles in the user and system space. (the numbers tell how busy the computer was while serving Hongpong.com to the CIA, Pakistani spammers and whatever strange digital alter-egos of sketchy global characters happened to trip into here). Anyhow, with a reboot the date seems to be sticking to correctness.
These changes signal a looming danger: In the year 2018, for the first time ever, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than the government collects in payroll taxes. And once that line into the red has been crossed, the shortfalls will grow larger with each passing year. By the time today's workers in their mid-20s begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt, unless we act to save it.
A crisis in Social Security can be averted, if we in government take our responsibilities seriously and work together today.
--President George Walker Bush, Dec. 11, 2004
As part of his sweeping vision of an America permanently altered by the 'mandate' afforded those in the 51% Republican majority, President Bush has pledged to drastically alter the Social Security apparatus first put in place by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935. Apparently fancying himself as the candidate of reform, ("The American people voted for reform in 2004, and now they expect us to work together and deliver on our promises." Mr. Bush stated in the same address, absurdly) the President has vowed to re-organize Social Security so that a portion of the funds each American worker pays into the fund could be invested by the individual in the stock market. The money, Mr. Bush's campaign jingle exclaimed, is yours, and you should be able to invest it as you see fit.
The notion of controlling the flow of a greater amount of one's own money is an attractive one as it is sold to the public by the White House; the government is taking your money, they argue, and investing it in a slow-growing fund secured against the value of massive quantities of US Treasury bonds bought from the Federal Reserve with the money paid into it through payroll taxes. These bonds accrue interest much too slowly, they argue, meaning a greater drain on current and future workers to support the Social Security surplus fund than if the money were to be invested in the stock market, which can provide much higher returns. Furthermore, as these bonds are issued by the Federal Government and their interest is paid out by that same government, the resulting flow of monies isn't "real", insofar as it is only an exchange of cash for debt. This is a masterfully spun interpretation of the situation and a shockingly duplicitous and manipulative one. The notion of outstanding bonds as being a meaningless promise from government to itself is astonishingly facile and dangerous from a foreign relations standpoint as pointed out by the inimitable Mr. Paul Krugman in his latest Opinion piece for the New York Times;
Privatizers say the trust fund doesn't count because it's invested in U.S. government bonds, which are "meaningless i.o.u.'s." Readers who want a long-form debunking of this sophistry can read my recent article in the online journal The Economists' Voice (www.bepress.com/ev).
The short version is that the bonds in the Social Security trust fund are obligations of the federal government's general fund, the budget outside Social Security. They have the same status as U.S. bonds owned by Japanese pension funds and the government of China. The general fund is legally obliged to pay the interest and principal on those bonds, and Social Security is legally obliged to pay full benefits as long as there is money in the trust fund.
So much for the theory of government bonds being empty promises, but what of the issue of pushing debt from one extremity of government to another: what does it matter where the debt is incurred, so long as it is debt?
Well, it does matter, because of the way that Social Security is structured. As it stands, Social Security is set up as a separate entity from the "General Fund"- that is, delineated outside of the revenues for all other areas of the goverment. However, this system became unsustainable long ago, as the number of workers contributing to each fund is shrinking in relation to the number of beneficiaries. To address this problem, Congress passed a "fix" in 1983 that established a huge 'surplus' fund that would last for generations into the future. In this surplus fund we see the real "crisis" with Social Security and the mendacity of those who purport to want to reform it.
The "surplus", if a fund of money already owed to future recipients can be thus labelled, is NOT separate from the general fund of the government. In fact, it is counted along with all the other receipts of the federal government. This means that there is no surplus in Social Security, as the government as a whole is wildly in debt. In fact, this surplus is often counted against the federal deficit in order to artificially drive down the figure. This is no mere accounting trick, either; what it means, in simplistic terms, is even with a federally-mandated ban against dipping into Social Security to use the funds for other spending priorities, (a prohibition that was violated itself by Lyndon Johnson to pay for the Vietnam War) the government has been borrowing against it for some time and has, in effect, spent it all in a glut of taxing and spending that has left the country as a whole deep in debt, as well.
The last element of the Social Security "reform" "plan" (seperate quotations intentional) to be dealt with is, in the order in which the reforms are sold, the first; the notion that your money would be better invested in the stock market. While it is true that the stock market can lead to much higher yields, it is unlikely that the White House is advocating that every American be allowed to day trade his or her own retirement plan from the comfort of their own home. Rather, in a handout to Wall Street, they are most likely talking about investing into a number of Government-approved index funds. Put together by large Wall Street brokerage firms, these funds would be made available to the enormous pool of Social Security investors to choose between. This element of the Bush plan has been the least reported-upon, and for good reason; it is unclear exactly what they and their cronies stand to gain from this. While thus far this article has attempted to shy away from slanderous or assumptive thinking, the track record of the Bushies as being shameless in their support of their former and future business and political associates is so clear, that for the sake of this article it is to be regarded as objective fact.
So, if the wheels are being greased somehow, whose wheels are being greased in this plan? Much of the attention has fallen on the Wall Street brokerages and how they are pushing for the cut behind the scenes. Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, et al. have all had a hand in promoting this move, but why? The journalistic community seems to believe that they are salivating at the prospect of the trillions of dollars they could manage in personal accounts. These accounts would each accrue administrative fees, meaning that Wall Street could potentially siphon billions of dollars of Goverment money out of the system and into their pockets. I am not an economist, nor do I have connections to Wall Street, but I am going to dismiss this notion out of hand for a couple of good reasons. I do not believe that Wall Street, in its heart of hearts, wants to become and insurance company-like management hub of a huge government bureaucracy. The tens of thousands of employees required, the advanced data systems that would have to be put in place, the increased regulatory involvement that would ensue on not just the funds but the market as a whole would all seem to be unsavory prospects to corporations that typically make their money in the world of high-margin wheelings and dealings. The slim margins of profit that would be enforced by the government (as Americans would sour quickly to the plan were the brokerage houses earning a healthy portion of 'their' money from the government) would make their administration more trouble than they're worth, not to mention the fact that they are completely unequipped to do so in the first place. No, Citigroup wants no part of these funds for the profit off of individualized accounts, they want them for other reasons.
The first of these reasons has to do with payroll taxes. Both corporations and their employees pay a payroll tax, evenly split, on the amount earned. This percentage has been increasing slowly with time, and is becoming an ever increasing burden on employers. As with private insurance, the American system of care and pensioning is employer-based, not government-based, and this means that all benefits received by an American worker are profits lost to the American employer. Huge employers like General Motors or General Electric are seeing an extraordinary amount of drag on their current profits because of benefits and pensions promised to their former workers. With the approaching retirement boom, this is only going to get worse, and employers are worried that they will bear the brunt of the storm. The Republicans are smpathetic to this, as they should be; business is the lifeblood of the country, and its future health should be ensured. However, the fix is a non-fix; The Bush administration has flatly stated that under their plan, payroll taxes would be capped at the current rates. The shortfall, they seem to be arguing, would be made up by greater returns from private investment accounts. This is an artful dodge, as nobody could possibly divine what the rate of return would be but, by the calculations of most economists, it would be slightly lower in the stock market than in government bonds. Bill Frist himself sunk a significant amount of campaign fund money into the fund a number of years ago, and discovered how things can work out in the reality-based community even for mere interlopers from la-la land:
A campaign fund controlled by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has lost almost $460,000 in stock market investments since 2000 and now does not have enough to cover a sizable bank loan, according to federal election records and the manager of the Frist account.
--Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2004
Clearly, the risk to the consumer/saver is great, so who wins? Well, though not for the reasons suspected by the neutered and retarded press, Wall Street would seem the obvious benefactor. The reason goes back to the payroll tax in part; with lower payroll taxes, large American manufacturers like GM and Intel free up future capital to plow into R&D or, more likely, profits. This means a healthier Wall Street in the kind of blue chips whose stability is important to even out the buffeting value of stocks in more volatile sectors of the economy. Second, if there are only to be a certain number of government-approved index shares, Wall Street investment houses could control the flow of the largest single pool of investment money in the country. Without strict governmetn regulation (as regulations are more likely to focus on the simpler issue of brokerage fees than the more complex ones of stock indexing), it would be possible to engineer trends on the market, or simply move funds in such a way as to bolster the company analyst's market outlook. The fees are peanuts, the enormous amount of cash on hand is not.
All of this is wild-eyed speculation, and distracts attention from the real issue: how do we maintain Social Security for the younger generations? The answer to this crisis is simple and, for some reason, completely unpalatable (at least in public) to both liberals and conservatives: balance the budget and tinker with Social Security. The enormous backwards-graduated tax plan passed by the Bush Administration just does not jive with the notion of ensuring the future of anything. When all governmetn is in the red, Social Security is in the red, and tinkering with the long viability of the program as a divorced entity from the rest of the federal budget is silly in the face of the budget shortfalls we are looking at. No, this is not reform, this is another "starve the beast" program. The idea is to put Social Security on poor footing at the same time that the government as a whole is wildly in debt so that it can eventually be dismantled and its surplus fund spent on other debt priorities in order to pay down debt without raising taxes. In the meantime, before the demise, the administration opposes further graduating the payout schedule (which would result in the rich paying more than they get back to bankroll the funds of those less fortunate) or raising the payout age. This means that their wealthy friends and benefactors receive the money they are owed and are allowed to invest it in the manner they almost certainly invest some of their other retirement savings, and reap the benefit of the current, more mildly graduated benefits schedule.
The real fixes to social security are: a raised retirement age, a more graduated benefits schedule and a slightly higher payroll tax. Other more radical fixes would be a consumption tax, pollution credits or a nationwide sales tax. THese would more accurately tax how much one spends rather than makes, making saving more attractive and targeting those who can most afford to pay by taxing their consumption. Sadly, these kind of sensible, humane and civic-minded reforms won't even be thought of for a moment.
Right now I am sitting in the BI room in the library watching C-SPAN on streaming video with Braham. Rep. Maxine Waters just wrapped up and she did a damn fine job raising questions about what happened in Ohio. We are fortunate to get the issue out there, although it will probably still get a low level of media attention.
I want to thank Rep. Waters, Senators Boxer and Harkin, and all the others who are standing up to question the fate of thousands of voters in that last farce of a fair election. As Rep. Kilpatrick (D-MI) is saying right now, this is the appropriate venue to speak on beahlf of those disenfranchised on November 2nd. Thanks, Democrats. You should have done this in January 2001.
Well, the time is upon us to certify last November's election, and there are some hopeful rumors that up to three senators were favorable to objecting to the certification of Ohio's electors. Possibly the certification of other states might be challenged, as well.
I will be back at the Dungeon of the Palace of DeWitt Wallace (ie the library computer lab) on Thursday so I will try to post some more stuff up as things in Washington unfold. Yes, the site has not been getting fresh content like we had going before finals. I would simply say that:
A) I have needed some time off of writing to read more–and actually read pleasant things, not the usual endless stream of insanity
B) the server had outdated versions of important software and it keeps forgetting what time it is. No, it is not 1904. So I've spent a while patching things up, strengthening the operation. This is especially important because
C) when looking through the hongpong.com server logs late last night, I discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency came back, (after their first openly identified visit—the real covert dudes would obviously use computers that didn't have IP numbers tied to CIA.gov) but this time, they downloaded a large section of things. I will say more about this later. Centcom.mil, the Joint Forces Command, and the usual jokers on Air Force and Army bases looking (via Google) for the violent military helicopter kill video keep coming back.
As you might imagine, the CIA has given me one of those weird post-paranoia feelings. I am not wildly alarmed, but it's motivated me to spend a while increasing the security of things, reflecting on what other script kiddies and spammers are trying to do all the time. I don't think the CIA has it 'in for me,' but it motivates me to keep a reasonably close eye on what is going on.
All this stuff has taken my attention away from looking at the election stuff and posting about it. But anyway here goes...
Your reading assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to look at the report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio." [Full PDF] I will post the whole executive summary below this stuff because it is important.
So bradblog.com is offering some hopeful rumors and tidbits. The great Clint Curtis will probably get some attention as well, as he was making the rounds through Capitol offices. Three senators, says Brad:
We have heard that there was a hard coalition of three Senators in support of challenging the Electors, while a larger number had hoped to simply publish a letter calling for Election Reform instead of taking the more impressive stand as recommended by the Constitution. There is a reason why in a body of hundreds, only two are required to immediately halt all proceedings in order to debate and investigate any Electoral chicanery.Well, that makes me feel a little more optimistic that the whole issue of vote integrity will get propelled into the news cycle for a while, but these days I just don't think it will stick. If it weren't for the tsunami disaster, there would have been a lot more oxygen in the media spin chamber for elevating this fight.
While Election Reform is clearly necessary, that can be done next week, or next month. Tomorrow is the moment for Senators to stand up with the 24 House of Representative members to challenge Electors for being illegally seated.
We're happy to report we've heard that the three Senators in favor of challenge held strong, at least for the day, and did not fold in favor of the "Letter" option.
Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Executive summary
Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events; summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis); and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward.
We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people’s trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority and Democratic voters:
• The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.” Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to “provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell’s decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states.
• Mr. Blackwell’s widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to engage in preelection “caging” tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges “can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell’s order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA.
Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for:
• There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell’s apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.
• We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.
• There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each – accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.
• There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.
Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete) :
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472 provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state.
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.
• The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.
Gooo Conyers, he's the man!