SYNDICATED COLUMN: Kill the Poor

Phony Poverty Study Fools Lazy Journalists

They’re baaack! Once again the Heritage Foundation is mangling statistics to whitewash the ugly facts of life in Republican-run America.

Last time, in 2005, they attacked the image of U.S. soldiers as cannon fodder being exploited for Halliburton. Au contraire, claimed the conservative propaganda mill. American troops, they said were actually “wealthier, more educated and more rural than the average” citizen. Of course, this wasn’t true. “Military personnel are poorer and less educated” than the average Joe, I found when I took a closer look. Heritage’s soldier study used junk logic and apples-to-oranges statistics to promote the GOP’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. And it worked.

The lazy men who run the big newspapers and TV networks, deluded into believing there are two sides to every story, dutifully repeated Heritage’s lies. They never questioned a word. More soldiers died. The Heritage story made us feel less guilty about it.

Now Heritage is telling us that there are no poor people–very few, anyway, and then only for short periods of time–in the United States. The truth is that capitalism is failing millions of Americans. The less we think about the problem, the less we think it is a problem, the worse it will become.

The pseudoacademic demagogues of the right want us to distrust our own eyes. Panhandlers? “Homeless by choice” urban campers, Ronald Reagan, patron saint of modern Republicanism, called them. Single mothers? He said they were “welfare queens.” Americans who live in the sprawling slums of the inner cities, the washed-up Walmarted Main Streets of the farm belt, and the scary barred-window suburbs of California and Georgia and Illinois? They’re living large, says the Heritage Foundation in a “study” whose dubious findings have already been reprinted–completely unquestioned, as usual–by hundreds of newspapers read by millions of gullible subscribers.

The Census Bureau says that 36.5 million Americans–one in eight–are poor. But “if poverty means a lack of nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, then very few of the people identified as living ‘in poverty’ would, in fact, be characterized as poor,” says Heritage’s Robert Rector. “The typical person defined as ‘poor’ by the Census has cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player or VCR, and two color TVs.”

No doubt, poor people in a technologically advanced nation like the United States don’t live as minimally as those in undeveloped states like Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, a middle-class American homeowner would be spectacularly wealthy. A man worth $500,000 could become a warlord. There are no Afghan billionaires. Poverty is relative.
Even the claim that gadget ownership is incompatible with true poverty doesn’t hold up: Rector refers to “a DVD player or VCR.” But VCRs are antiquated, a decade out of date. It’s like saying that someone who owns “a computer or a typewriter” isn’t poor.

“Poor Americans living in houses or apartments, on average, have more living space per person than does the average citizen living in European countries such as England, France and Germany,” the Heritage study asserts. There’s a footnote–but the source material doesn’t include figures for per-capita housing density in Europe. (As far as I can tell, such data doesn’t exist.) Even if it’s true, though, it’s a factoid without a point. Europe, urbanized for the past 2000 years, has an overall higher population density than we do–yet enjoys the world’s highest standard of living.

The more you think about Heritage’s BS, the worse it gets.

“Three quarters of these ‘poor'”–note the quotes–own a car,” Rector continues. Are those cars in good working order, or up on blocks? He doesn’t say–but there’s a difference.

“When asked, [the typical ‘poor person’] reports that his family was able to obtain medical care whenever needed during the past year,” he continues. True–sorta. Uninsured people often rely on hospitals, enduring long waits and high fees for substandard care rendered by harried emergency room staffers. Hospitals are legally obligated to treat them–but it’s hardly a workable system. Many poor (and middle class) people put off going to the doctor as long as possible.

Then there’s this sparkling gem of compassion: “Some poor families,” admits Rector, “do experience a temporary food shortage, a condition touted as ‘hunger’ by activists. But even this condition is relatively rare: 89 percent of the poor report their families always have ‘enough’ food to eat, while only 2 percent say they ‘often’ do not have enough to eat.”

“Temporary food shortage.” If that isn’t hunger, what is? “Very simply,” says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “hunger is defined as the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food. When we talk about hunger in America, we refer to the ability of people to obtain sufficient food for their household. Some people may find themselves skipping meals or cutting back on the quality or quantity of food they purchase at the stores. This recurring and involuntary lack of access to food can lead to malnutrition over time.”

Economists consider a society’s infant mortality rate to be the most reliable indicator of its citizens’ quality of life, and the prevalence of poverty. The United States has the second-worst infant morality rate in the industrialized world–behind Latvia, tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia. Western Europe–France, Germany, etc.–kicks our national ass. The poverty rate for American children under 18 was 21.9 percent in 2006, the highest in the developed world.

Upwardly mobile Americans can escape poverty numerous ways–by, for example, earning a college scholarship. But we also suffer a lot of downward mobility, typically after losing a job. “While in any given year 12 to 15 percent of the population is poor,” says Michael Zweig, author of “What’s Class Got To Do With It, American Society in the 21st Century” (2004), “over a ten-year period 40 percent experience poverty in at least one year because most poor people cycle in and out of poverty.”
Even the Heritage Foundation concedes that some poverty exists in this best of all possible laissez faire worlds. But, they argue in the finest tradition of blame-the-victim, it’s “self-inflicted, a result of poor decisions and self-defeating behaviors.”

Poor Americans, they say, have a “weak work ethic.” The evidence: “The typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year–16 hours per week. “If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year–the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year–nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.” This assumes that poor parents live in a magical job market where they can work as many hours as they please–a condition that would only exist with zero percent unemployment.

“Father absence is another major cause of child poverty,” says Heritage’s poverty study. True. “Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock.” Again true. The conservative solution: “If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.” Stupid welfare queens! Why do they refuse to marry the fathers of their children?

A cat or dog understands hunger. The fact that we have to have this discussion demonstrates the success of the right in redefining basic terms–and the failure of the press to question it.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

This Week’s Column: GONZALES V. UNITED STATES

Here’s this week’s column. Comments may be posted here.

A Torturer Takes a Victory Lap
NEW YORK–Al Capone served six years at Alcatraz–for tax evasion. The true Original Gangsta was never held to account for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that left seven men cut in half by machine gun fire. Or the two disloyal wiseguys he ordered beaten to death with baseball bats. Or the corruption and mayhem his gangsters inflicted during the years he terrorized Chicago. Eliot Ness was cute, but the justice system failed. Capone won in the end.

Like Capone, Alberto Gonzales has gone down for a mere misdemeanor: firing U.S. attorneys for investigating Republican politicians. What led to his resignation as attorney general was his smearing them as incompetent. Hell hath no fury as a man fired without a positive recommendation. (Gonzales, a buffoon on his best day, perjured himself in spectacularly inept style in testimony about domestic wiretapping before Congress–an outfit that has forgotten more about lying than lesser lights will ever know.)

Gonzales’ crime was a doozy: He created the legal framework for American fascism. No punishment could suffice for America’s Eichmann, author of infamous pseudolegal rationales for torture and the end of habeas corpus. And none will he face.

“Fredo” (Bush’s nickname for him) quit over a procedural personnel matter. If he ultimately faces justice, it will be for mere perjury. Even his critics don’t care about his monstrous role as the legal architect of our post-9/11 gulags–proof positive that the master corrupter of democracy has triumphed, that we Americans are not a decent people.

“Are we being forward-leaning enough?” Gonzales used to ask his colleagues. “Forward-leaning” was Bush Administration jargon for toughness in the war on terror. It didn’t mean bending the rules. The Bushies were radicals. Trashing centuries-old constitutional protections–the right to an attorney, to face your accuser in a court of law, not to be tortured–wasn’t enough for our suburban Robespierres. They longed for an American Rome ruled by a harsh, omnipotent emperor over legions of troops standing ready to destroy all who challenged them, foreigners and Americans alike. They said 9/11 had changed everything. The new order required new laws.

One of the first steps down the road to perdition was a January 25, 2002 legal memorandum advising Bush to deny legal rights to Afghan POWs. “There are reasonable grounds for you to conclude that [the Geneva P.O.W. Convention] does not apply…to the conflict with the Taliban,” wrote Gonzales, then working as White House counsel. Deploying his characteristic blend of ignorance, arrogance and illogic, he called the Geneva Conventions–which have saved the lives of thousands of captured American soldiers–“quaint.” He then argued “that the Taliban and its forces were, in fact, not a government but a militant, terrorist-like group.” Actually, the Clinton and Bush Administrations had treated the Taliban regime as a government, negotiating with its leaders over oil-pipeline transit fees and subsidizing it with millions of U.S. taxdollars. U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, had embassies in Kabul. History was collateral damage in the war of terror.

Having denied captured Afghan soldiers POW status–“detainees,” newspapers began calling them–the Bush Administration looked for “forward-leaning” ways to abuse them. Children as young as 12 were beaten, shipped in shackles, their heads shaved and covered with gunny sacks, to Guantánamo Bay. Years have passed; they’ve grown up in Camp Delta. These kids–rural conscripts who couldn’t have attacked the U.S. even if they’d thought of it–still haven’t been allowed to see a lawyer or their parents.

Worried that the American people might someday return to its senses and prosecute them for their monstrous crimes against humanity, the Bushies again turned to their affirmative-action poster child–this time for a C.Y.A. memo validating torture. The CIA wanted permission to use six “pressure techniques” against prisoners. Mock burial, Gonzales and his legal staff thought, was a mite “too harsh.” The medieval practice of waterboarding, on the other hand, was OK. Another practice, “open-handed slapping of suspects, drew much discussion,” reported Newsweek. The idea was “just to shock someone with the physical impact,” one of Gonzales’ staffers said, with “little chance of bone damage or tissue damage.” Gonzales approved it.

The discussion resulted in an August 1, 2002 memo to Gonzales, which he passed on to Bush. The CIA and U.S. soldiers were free to subject prisoners to “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment. All they needed was permission from the Emperor. “Those committing torture with express presidential authority,” The Washington Post reported about the memo, “were probably immune from prosecution.” Abu Ghraib followed.

Slippery slopes are usually cited as cautionary tales. Gonzales saw post-9/11 fear as an opportunity to be exploited. He pushed for the USA Patriot Act. Foreign detainees, he decided, would get military kangaroo courts. Using Gonzales’ advice as back-up, Bush signed an executive order authorizing himself to declare any U.S. citizen an “enemy combatant” and have him assassinated. Next came the terrifying Military Commissions Act, which allows a president to declare martial law, seize control of the National Guard from the states, and throw U.S. citizens into concentration camps for the rest of their lives.

But no one objected to any of these attacks on our freedom. Not the news media. Not the Democrats–they voted for them.

After Torturer-in-Chief Gonzales announced his departure, Ted Kennedy slammed him–for perjury. “He has exhibited a lack of candor with Congress and the American people and a disdain for the rule of law and our constitutional system,” said the liberal stalwart. “The rampant politicization of federal law enforcement that occurred under his tenure seriously eroded public confidence in our justice system,” added House speaker Nancy Pelosi, focusing, like everybody else, on the fired U.S. attorneys. The word “torture” didn’t come up.

Gonzales will be remembered as corrupt and intellectually deficient. Nevertheless, his legal legacy will likely remain in place for the foreseeable future. Torture isn’t in the news because it isn’t news. It’s normal.

The monster dragged the rest of us down to his level. We are all Alberto Gonzales.

COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

We Will Bury You!
posted by Susan Stark

An urban legend has it that Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table and said those four words to the West, indicating that Communism will bury Capitalism.

We chuckle at that now, because after all, we won, didn’t we? We buried communism.

Well, yes, we did, after a fashion.

Unfortunately, though, it’s rearing it’s ugly head again. No, I’m not talking about Hugo Chavez with his Bolivarianism, or Putin with his resurgent Mafia-socialism. What I’m talking about is popping up in the good old U S of A.

Comrades, let me introduce you to Chairman Rupert Murdoch. He is doing what Khrushchev wanted to do but didn’t live to do: He is burying us.

If we are all eventually forced into reading or listening or watching HIS media for our information, it would certainly be the equivalent of reading Pravda.

Just as much as if the Walton family owned every means of buying stuff, as they are trying to do right now. Imagine long lines at Wal-mart snaking around the block, parallel to the Soviet lines to buy clothing or toilet paper.

Because, that’s the irony. The greater the corporate and individual concentration of ownership in our society, the closer we come to Soviet-style economy, where everything is owned and distributed by a single entity (in their case, it was the State).

When Chairman Murdoch gains control of a newspaper, for instance, he “promises” not to change the content. But he turned the New York Post from a mainstream liberal paper into a tabloid/fascist rag that hasn’t made a profit since he acquired it. But profit isn’t nearly as important as dominance, when you’re trying to manipulate public opinion.

Fortunately, we have an alternative to this corporate-communism, if we are willing to make the effort. There is a little-known news network that aims to become an alternative to not only to Fox News, but also to CNN and the rest of the cookie-cutter networks.

It’s called the REAL NEWS!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXtLgMedyI

Column: IT DID HAPPEN HERE

Here’s this week’s column, available for comment:

American Citizen Tortured, Convicted of Thought Crime

NEW YORK–“Just about everyone agrees that the recent conviction of Abdullah al-Muhajir, a.k.a. Jose Padilla, is a good thing,” wrote right-wing pundit Neil Kressel in The New York Post. Indeed, just about everyone did. “It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber,” opined the liberal editorial board of The New York Times. (They went on to criticize the way the Bush Administration denied Padilla due process.)

Meet Mr. Not Everyone.

Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen born in Brooklyn who converted to Islam, was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2002. Using the bombastic “1984”-style rhetoric of the post-9/11 era, then-attorney general John Ashcroft announced that Padilla had participated in an “unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb.” Padilla’s arrest, Ashcroft ranted, would have caused “mass death and injury” in an American city.

But there wasn’t any evidence. Or there wasn’t enough to convict him in court. Which was, under the system of justice citizens of Western countries have lived under for eight centuries, the same thing.

Before 9/11 and “preventative detention” and legal torture and scary new laws like the USA-Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act eliminated habeas corpus, Padilla would have sat in jail a day or two. He might have gotten roughed up. Then he’d have walked.

That was under democracy. In Bush’s neofascist security state, Padilla rotted in solitary confinement–in a military brig–for three and a half years. (Read Henry Charriere’s classic prison memoir “Papillon” if you doubt that solitary confinement is a form of torture.) No family visits. No lawyer. They subjected him to sensory deprivation, covering his eyes and ears to make him lose his mind.

And still no trial. Because the government knew Padilla was innocent.

By 2006 Bush was unpopular. Federal judges had begun to regrow their ‘nads, ruling that the Administration had to charge Padilla or release him. So the Bushies came up with a clever dodge whose narrow legalism was worthy of depends-on-the-meaning-of-is: they transferred Padilla to the civilian justice system and charged him with something else.

Or, to be specific, something less. They added Padilla to a case against two Middle Eastern men on trial for “conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people in a foreign country” and “material support” for Islamic terrorism. Padilla had met the two in Florida and, prosecutors say, traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to join Al Qaeda. The key evidence presented was Padilla’s supposed Al Qaeda application form, which fingerprints proved he had handled.

Padilla’s public defenders claimed that their client was forced to pick up the “Al Qaeda form” in the brig. Who knows what happened while he was “disappeared” during those three and a half years?

“There is no need to show any particular violent crime [in a conspiracy trial],” said law professor Robert Chesney, of Wake Forest University. “You don’t have to specify the particular means used to carry out the crime.” Nevertheless, Padilla faces the possibility of life in prison.

Of course, the United States wasn’t at war with Afghanistan in 2000. Before 9/11 the Clinton and Bush Administrations both sent millions of dollars to the Taliban. The vast majority of Muslims who trained at Al Qaeda camps never plotted against the U.S. They planned to fight in places like Chechnya, Kosovo and Xinjiang. Padilla’s membership in Al Qaeda, even if proven, doesn’t prove anti-Americanism.

Post-9/11 conspiracy prosecutions are de facto attempts to make anti-Americanism–the mere thought, not any action–illegal.

“It is a pretty big leap between a mere indication of desire to attend a camp and a crystallized desire to kill, maim and kidnap,” said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University. The conspiracy count against Padilla, Margulies continued, “is highly amorphous, and it basically allows someone to be found guilty for something that is one step away from a thought crime.”

The charge was laughable and the standard of proof rock-bottom. But the masters of Padilla’s show trial didn’t miss a chance to cheese up the proceedings.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier never presented evidence that Padilla actually joined or was accepted by Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, reported the Associated Press, he “mentioned Al Qaeda 91 times in his opening statement and more than 100 times in his closing, according to court transcripts.” Padilla had nothing to do with 9/11. To link him to the attacks in jurors’ minds, Frazier had them watch a seven-minute video clip of Osama bin Laden. (There’s no evidence that Padilla ever watched the 1997 CNN interview.)

Padilla’s lawyers asked the judge in the case to dismiss the case because he had been denied a speedy trial. Marcia Cooke said no–and ordered them not to talk to the jury about the three and a half years the defendant had spent being tortured and deprived of his rights.

Reporters’ eyes rolled as Frazier said that government wiretappers heard Padilla and his two co-defendents use code words like “football” to mean jihad and “eggplant” and “zucchini” for weapons. “They wanted to recruit, fund and train fighters,” he told the jury. “Playing this kind of football was more important than anything else to these men. What they were doing was no game.” But, reported the AP, Padilla’s “voice was only picked up on seven of the FBI intercepts, [and] he never talked in code.” He shouldn’t have been convicted–even on those lame-ass conspiracy charges.

Osama bin Laden is an ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy. So, apparently, is Uncle Sam. Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University, said after the verdict: “It’s kind of a dirty victory because of the way the case came about, but still it’s a victory nonetheless.” Yeah. But for whom?

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)
COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Stop the Genocide . . . in Iraq
posted by Susan Stark

Have you ever heard of the phrase, “selective compassion”?

This would characterize anyone, particularly Westerners, who zealously champion the cause of the Darfurians.

The actess Mia Farrow, and journalists like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and Nick Kristof of the New York Times shout at the top of their computer software and shed hot tears for Darfur. They regularly use their columns and celebrity status to guilt-trip us that we are not doing enough to “save” the hundreds of thousands who have died, and the millions who’ve become refugees in the Sudan.

And, I would have to agree with them. We aren’t doing enough. But . . . is it really “our” job to do anything for the Darfurians? I am about to argue, heresy of heresies, that it’s not.

It may be the job of the Europeans, the Africans, the Asians, or even the South Americans to save Darfur. Maybe it’s the job of Canadians to save Darfur.

But for Americans, our task is to save Iraqis, not Darfurians. There are now around 700, 000 Iraqis dead as a result of the Iraq War, and there are 3 million refugees, either exiled or internally displaced. And we Americans are either directly or indirectly responsible for this condition, whether we’ve supported the War or not, because we pay for it with our tax dollars. And if such a condition in Darfur is called a “genocide”, then the same label also applies for Iraq.

Yet, you don’t see Ms. Farrow or Mr. Hentoff or Mr. Kristof crying and guilt-tripping Americans over these pour souls. I guess it’s easier see genocide when some else is doing it, like the Arab Sudanese, then when you are doing it. Yes, all this constant concern for Darfurians provides a wonderful distraction away from the many more Iraqis suffering under the same conditions.

To all of these “selectively compassionate” celebrities and journalists shedding crocodile tears for Darfur, I say this: You can stop the waterworks right now, and you can start doing something for the Iraqis suffering because of you.

Stop the Genocide in Iraq.

http://www.lifeusa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=a_iraqidps
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/iraq.cfm
http://www.uuiraq.org/english/175.htm
http://ga3.org/campaign/Iraqi_refugees

Oh, and let’s not forget Afghanistan:

http://afghanwomensmission.org/index.php

This Week’s Column

Here’s this week’s column. Feel free to post comments here.

SHAME: CHINA’S MOST VALUABLE EXPORT

Zhang Shuhong was a nice boss to the end. On the last day of his life the fiftyish entrepreneur greeted his employees as they arrived at his factory and wished them a good shift. Then he went to the company warehouse and hanged himself.

Zhang was co-owner of the Lee Der Industrial Company, the Chinese company that made toys for Mattel using toxic levels of lead paint. Mattel issued a recall expected to cost the company in the neighborhood of $30 million.
Poor guy–he probably didn’t even know the paint his workers were slathering on nearly a million toys for preschoolers was dangerous. “The boss and the company were harmed by the paint supplier, the closest friend of our boss,” reported the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper.

“It is not uncommon for Chinese executives to commit suicide after suffering damage to their reputation,” noted the UK Telegraph.

Zhang’s death followed the July execution of Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration from 1994 to 2005. Zheng was convicted of accepting $850,000 in bribes from eight pharmaceutical companies in exchange for approving fake and substandard drugs. An antibiotic involved in the case killed at least 10 people.

The Xinhua news agency didn’t say how Zheng was killed, but most Chinese executions are carried out with a single gunshot to the back of the head. Shortly afterward a policeman notifies the condemned man’s family by presenting them with a bill for the cost of the bullet.

Now that’s accountability. Can we import some of that too?

The late Mssrs. Zhang and Zheng oversaw corruption and incompetence that pales next to catastrophes for which no American has yet been held to account. Thousands died in hurricane Katrina because officials all the way up to George “Heckuva job, Brownie!” Bush made a conscious decision not to help. Two years later, what’s left of New Orleans is dying, murdered by an appalling political calculus: It is (was) black. It was Democratic. Shouldn’t government officials face a firing squad for killing a major city?

What about Iraq? It wouldn’t bring back the million dead civilians or the thousands of dead soldiers, but watching Wolfy and Rummy and Cheney hold hands as they leapt off the tallest building in D.C. might brighten the day of their grieving relatives.

The same goes for the war against Afghanistan, which state-controlled media has finally conceded is a lost cause. (Lead story in the August 12th New York Times: “How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad.”) Save some rope for the Democratic politicians and the phony journalists who insisted that Bush had “taken his eye off the ball in Afghanistan” to invade Iraq. The blood splattered by every errant Hellfire missile, every blown-up wedding party and the bullet wounds in Pat Tillman’s body are their responsibility.

If execution is good enough for Cao Wenzhuang, a Chinese FDA official accused of taking $307,000 in bribes, how about his American counterparts? As cancer patients drop like flies, U.S. FDA bureaucrats delay approval of drugs that could have saved their lives.

Eloxatin, a drug used to treat advanced colorectal cancer, has been approved in at least 29 countries–but the FDA rejected it anyway. Under pressure from terminally ill patients, the agency then approved it. But they dragged their feet for more than two years. Some 40,000 Americans died during the delay.

“Twelve drugs–had they been available to people denied entry to clinical trials–might have helped more than one million mothers, fathers, sons and daughters live longer, better lives,” say the founders of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.

I’m not sure I’d want to live somewhere as uptight as China. At its border with Tajikistan recently, a white-gloved policeman stood ramrod straight, sweating under a blazing sun, waiting to direct traffic. Because the border was closed for lunch, however, there was no traffic. Even when vehicles began moving, he had no traffic to direct–it was a straight road, not an intersection. Some official thought the border needed a traffic cop, so there he was.

Still, the Chinese get some things right. “Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation,” says Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of China’s FDA. We could use some shame here in America.

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)
COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL

Cartoon Comments on Double Secret Probation

If the low volume of commentary about the cartoons posted here continues through next week, I will likely stop posting them here in the . You will, of course, be able to continue reading them in their usual spot in the cartoon section.

They Pay Wankers, Don’t They?

Never before in my lifetime has the American people been more poorly served by its pundit class. I’ve previously written about the neo-con pseudointellectuals who got us into two losing wars against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq: Bill Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, etc. Because there is no God or at least no American culture of enforced accountability, all continue to draw paychecks for their worthless, discredited opinions.

But wankdom isn’t confined to neo-cons. Michael Kinsley, currently writing a column for Time magazine, exposes the sloppy thinking that repeatedly gets the world’s richest (and in some ways its coolest) into one utterly avoidable fiasco after another. Consider his column in the August 13th issue:

There is grim fun to be had, and many are having it, by reviewing what the pundits said back in 2002 and 2003 about the notion of going to war in Iraq and comparing it with what they are saying as they survey the results today. They’ve all changed their tunes, a little or a lot, with various degrees of contrition.

Not “all.” Some of us got it right. Back in 2003 and 2002 and even 2001, the left—the real left, not the squishy soft liberals who play the left on TV—called Bush on his dictatorial tendencies, his lack of planning and the low odds of success in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Politicians, too, are under pressure to recant anything nice they may have said about the Iraq war–or, if they were Senators at the time, to apologize for their votes in favor. Some, like John Edwards, have done so. But one important voice was as wrong as any of them and now is among the most censorious about the way things have turned out. Yet this voice has never acknowledged its previous errors. In fact, no one expects it to do so, even though it is more responsible than any pundit for U.S. policy in Iraq. This is the voice of the citizenry, the American people.

Americans are unhappy with President George W. Bush right now. In the New York Times/CBS News poll, his approval rating dipped to 29% during July before nosing back up a point. Approval of Bush’s handling of what is delicately called “the situation in Iraq” is only 25%. By 53% to 39%, we disapprove of the way he is handling the war on terrorism. “Looking back,” 51% say that the U. S. “should … have stayed out” of Iraq, while only 42% think the invasion was “the right thing.” Two-thirds of Americans think our “efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq” are going somewhat or very badly, and the same fraction think we should withdraw in part or completely.

Dislike of opinion polls is one of the great clichés of American politics, but it’s not clear exactly what people dislike. They dislike politicians who follow the opinion polls, and they dislike politicians who fail to follow the will of the people, as revealed in opinion polls. But the real problem with opinion polls is different: they reinforce the impression that everything is a matter of opinion, and all opinions are equally valid.

Although–or perhaps because–I manufacture opinions for a living, I am always amazed at the things people are willing to express opinions about.

I’m writing this early, and my coffee may not have kicked in quite as nicely as I might like, but there’s something mighty hilarious about Kinsley claiming that he “manufactures” opinions. Maybe he thinks that’s his job. But he’s supposed to express opinions. It would also be nice if his opinions of what was going on were supplemented by largely accurate predictions of what was going to happen. That’s his job too.

Is the “surge” working? Is there likely to be a terrorist attack in the next few months? Are “most of the insurgents in Iraq today … under the command of Osama bin Laden”? These are not matters of opinion. The correct answer may be unknown (e.g., the success of the surge), or it may be known perfectly well (e.g., bin Laden does not control most of the Iraqi insurgents), but one thing the correct answer is not is a matter of opinion.

Even when getting it right, Kinsley gets it wrong. Bin Laden doesn’t control any of Iraq’s insurgents. According to everyone, even the Pentagon, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia doesn’t take orders from Al Qaeda, the Pakistani-based umbrella group for various Islamist groups. The Iraqis took the name to fuck with us.

But in opinion polls, citizens are treated like gods, dispensing or withholding their “approval” on any basis they wish or none at all. They may give a President a green light to go to war (not that Bush needed it) and then condemn him for going when it turns out badly. Just after 9/11, Bush’s approval rating was as high as 90%. Only 5% disapproved. In the spring of 2003, when Bush launched the war, deposed Saddam Hussein, occupied Iraq and declared victory, public approval of his conduct of the Iraq “situation” rarely dipped below 70%. As the “situation” went south, so did Bush’s poll numbers, until now he faces snarling or sullen disapproval from two-thirds of the electorate.

Ninety percent of the electorate once approved of Bush’s “handling” of terrorism. Now only 39% approve. That means at least 51%, or more than half of all Americans, used to support Bush on terrorism but don’t anymore. You might say they have decided they were wrong, but opinion-poll democracy requires no such self-criticism. Political opinions are like old-fashioned airline tickets, with no change penalty.

The American people haven’t “decided they were wrong” about Iraq. They’ve decided they were lied to. And they’re right. I’m not going to recite all the Bush Administration quotes about mushroom clouds and anthrax and fighting “them” “there” and linking 9/11 to Saddam—something Bush continues to do all these years later. If you read the , you know all that stuff. Criticize the American public for trusting their government to tell them the truth. Honestly, after Watergate and a million other examples, there’s no reason for anyone to believe what a politician says. But let’s not pretend that the public changed its mind because it’s fickle and because the war is going badly. The war going badly is what proves that we were lied to; that was the very thing that was not supposed to happen.

The U.S. is now despised around the world because of the Iraq “situation.” Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead as the result of our deliberate decision to invade and occupy another country with no immediate provocation. We reduced that country to ruin and chaos, and now we care only about how and how quickly we can get out of this mess we created.

This is not all the fault of the pundits or of “Washington” or of politicians. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq was scandalously unilateral, but it did in fact have the support of most American citizens, which surely egged him on.

Chicken, meet egg. The Bushists manufactured support for their stupid-ass wars (use the plural! there are two!) by repeatedly lying about WMDs and being greeted as liberators and claiming we’d be getting even with the mofos who carried out 9/11. Which, of course, they did use to claim a mandate. But is that the people’s fault?

. The ensuing disaster is partly the fault of those Americans who told pollsters back in 2002 and 2003 that they supported Bush’s war and then in 2004 voted to re-elect him, which he took, quite reasonably, as an endorsement of his policies.

Whoa, pony! “Re-elect”? Even a squishy pseudo-liberal like Kinsley oughta know Bush lost the 2000 election—shit, he lost Florida by thousands of votes! And, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t have jurisdiction to rule in Bush v. Gore. (States run elections, so state courts—not federal ones—handle disputes over their outcomes.) If you think Bush won in 2004, he was at best elected, not re-elected. But there’s plenty of doubt about the bullshit that went down in Ohio. And even if you allow that Ohio was legitimately a Republican state in 2004, Bush was running for “re-election” using a phony and illegitimate incumbency.

Millions of Americans now apparently regret those opinions. But unlike the politicians and the pundits, they do not face pressure to recant or apologize. American democracy might be stronger if they did.

How exactly, Mr. Kinsley, are “millions of Americans” supposed to “recant” or “apologize”? I share his annoyance at those morons who, had they only bothered to scratch the surface, should have known that Bush was a serial liar. But I don’t expect them to apologize. An apology, after all, isn’t going to bring back the million Iraqis and 3,000 soldiers and trillion dollars that have gone down the sinkhole. No, what I expect from the American people is to remember how all this went down the next time some two-bit huckster tries to sell them a line of shit, and to activate their skepticism chip.

Hopefully the professional opinion “manufacturers” will lead rather than blame the people.

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