Vital Businesses Need Nationalization

The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump.

“You’re kidding me,” I moaned.

“It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.”

There has to be a better way, I thought.

And there is.

It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery.

Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros.

Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It’s 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with…with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.

One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they’re oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources–and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth.

But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don’t consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low.

Unlike corporations, governments don’t care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you’re cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can’t, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work.
Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela’s socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. “If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I’m going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them,” he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up.

Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez’s determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat’s Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. “This government needs to tighten the screws,” he said in February 2008, promising to “intervene and nationalize the plants” belonging to the two transnational corporations.

Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves.

When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn’t, it isn’t just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.

The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices–a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. “Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action–or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets–to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon’s underlying causes,” reported Forbes.

So the G8 ministers punted. “Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study,” wrote the magazine.

The problem isn’t the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It’s capitalism. A sane government doesn’t leave essential goods and services–food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education–to the vicissitudes of “magic” markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by–indeed, owned by–the government.

Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn’t get an education.

Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California’s Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater’s atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations’ fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.

No one should pressure industries that produce things that people need in order to live to turn a quarterly profit. No one should go hungry, or remain sick, because some commodities trader in Zurich figured out some nifty way to take an eighth of a point arbitrage spread between the price of a hospital stock in New York and in Tokyo.

P.S. If you’re reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The System Works? Not Really

Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain “disappeared,” possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.

For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied “unlawful enemy combatants” (or, as Dick Cheney called them, “the worst of the worst” terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence
against them in a court of law.

Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America’s latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other American gulags, will now be allowed to demand their day in court. Since the government doesn’t have evidence against them, legal experts say, most if not all of “the worst of the worst” will ultimately walk free. “Liberty and security can be reconciled,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

In short: Oops.

“America is back,” Barack Obama has said he will tell the world if he becomes president. Even if McCain wins, Guantánamo will probably be closed. Torture will be re-illegalized. Which is really, really great. But there’s a problem. How do we give back the four years we stole from Murat Kurnaz?

In December 2001, Kurnaz was a 19-year-old German Muslim studying in Pakistan. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani security services, who delivered him to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty. He was flown to Guantánamo concentration camp, where he received what The Village Voice‘s Nat Hentoff calls “the standard treatment: beatings, sleep deprivation, and special month-long spells of solitary confinement in a sealed cell without ventilation.”

He went on hunger strike, and Kurnaz’s tormentors apparently worried he might starve to death. After 20 days “they gagged me and shoved a tube up my nose, stopping several times because the tube filled with blood,” Kurnaz remembers.

What did this “worst of the worst” do to deserve such treatment? Nothing. But don’t take my word for it. Six months into his ordeal, the U.S. military determined, there was “no definite link or evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”

The U.S. government knew Kurnaz was innocent. Yet they held on to him another three and a half years.

Oops.

It would be comforting if the torture of innocent men sold by self-interested bounty hunters were an aberration. It wasn’t. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis confirms the horrifying results of a Seton Hall University study. “Only eight percent of Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces,” reports McClatchy. “86 percent were turned over to the U.S. by Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance,” a coalition of Afghan warlords. “The bounty hunters were often the source of allegations.”

Right-wingers say security matters can only be entrusted to the military. “The courts,” writes Richard Samp of the pro-government Washington Legal Foundation in USA Today, “simply lack the expertise and resources to justify second-guessing military experts on such issues.” Maybe. But the military is run by liars.

“The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush Administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren’t ‘the worst of the worst.’ From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn’t belong there.”

At least six died at Gitmo. (The Pentagon characterized a spate of suicides as clever acts of “asymmetrical warfare.”)

Oops.

Deranged leaders who carry out horrific acts of mass murder and oppression with the consent of the people are hardly new to American history, reminds Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States. “Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s,” he told a commencement ceremony at Southern Methodist University. “Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the Cold War McCarthy era, and from there the civil liberties climate in our time.”

So many oopsies! But those are temporary excesses, Weinstein reassures. “Self-corrective forces at work in American society”–lefties, liberals, a single swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court–always pull us back before we careen off the brink. Disaster is avoided.

Which would be fine if it weren’t for the problem that: (1) one of these days, Justice Kennedy won’t be around to restore the rule of law. The other problem being (2): a lot of “witches” get drowned during our periodic episodes of madness.

No one was ever held accountable for blacklisting actors or massacring Native Americans. Such tacit endorsement of villainy sets the stage for the next outrage committed during a future “temporary madness” driven by national security worries. Apologies are rare. Penance is scarce and stingy. The government stole the homes and businesses of Japanese-Americans and shipped them to concentration camps during World War II; decades passed before Congress cut them checks for a measly $10,000.

We think we Americans are good people who do bad things when we’re not on top of our game. “Self-corrective forces,” we pat ourselves on our collective backsides, always kick in before we go too far.

But that’s not really how it is.

Some Americans are good. Other Americans are bad. And the good ones are often lazy, willing to let the bad ones get their way.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The U.S. Has Rivals and Competitors, Not Enemies

“A Gallup poll,” Libby Quaid wrote for the Associated Press on June 2nd, “found that two-thirds of [Americans] said they believe it would be a good idea for the president to meet with the leaders of enemy countries.”

Who are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. “Enemy countries”? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn’t have enemy countries.

September 11 aside, citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies–more like wholly owned subsidiaries. As for the rest of the world, well, they’ve been pretty nice to us.

Not that we deserve it. Since 1941, the U.S. has attacked, among others, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Not once were we defending ourselves. We were always the aggressor. Over the course of six decades during which we were the world’s leading instigator of armed conflict, no one attacked us–not even the people we attacked! No one declared war upon us.

Yet everywhere you turn, on every channel and in every newspaper, there’s some politician or journalist using that word to describe another country: enemy. John McCain bashes Barack Obama for appeasing “the enemy” (he means Iran). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, also about Obama and Iran, Joe Lieberman sniped: “Too many Democrats seem to have become confused about the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.” After 9/11 self-loathing gay neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan called opponents of the Bush Administration “the enemy within the West itself–a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column.” The Bush Administration even incorporates the E-word in a term it invented, found nowhere in U.S. or international law, to describe its political prisoners: “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Enemies! Enemies! Enemies! Enemies everywhere, but never an attack.

Slacker enemies!

Iran isn’t an enemy. It’s a regional rival, a competitor, and a relatively good-natured one at that. Not only did the Iranians open a western front against the Taliban during America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, they offered assistance to downed U.S. pilots. Iran has requested talks leading to the establishment of full diplomatic relations. We keep refusing. The British have since backed away from their claims that new Iranian-made improvised explosive devices were killing U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. (The story never made sense, given that they were used by Sunni insurgent groups–who hate Shiite Iran.)

Occasionally someone tries to point out the obvious: we’re not at war. No war = no enemies. It’s the truth. But the truth doesn’t go over well.

James Rubin, assistant secretary of state under President Clinton, was interviewed recently by the Journal‘s Paul Gigot on Fox News. “I think it’s quite clear that Iran and North Korea and others are a danger to the United States,” Rubin said.

Gigot laid into Rubin: “You said a danger, but you didn’t say enemies. Are they enemies?”

Rubin: “Well, I don’t know, you know, enemies–we’re not in a state of war with Iran. Traditionally, the word ‘enemy’ is for a state of war. We’re in a state war with the Shiite militias, with Al Qaeda, we’re in a state of war.”

Gigot: “But they’re contributing–“

Rubin: “Iran has policies that we object to and we reject, and we should confront.”

Gigot: “But they’re contributing to the deaths of Americans, if you listen to the American military, in Iraq, by supporting some of those rogue militias. Doesn’t that make them enemies?” [Ted here: These claims were debunked two years before this exchange.]

Rubin: “That makes them a country that is dangerous to the United States, and we need to confront that danger directly.” In other words, a country can supply weapons to your enemy without becoming your enemy. Which, considering that the U.S. is the world’s largest arms merchant, is a good thing. The last thing we need is more enemies! (Not that we have any now.)

Why do we call states with whom we disagree “enemies”? Religion writer Eboo Patel blames radical Islamists, and 9/11 for spooking us. “Terrorism,” Patel wrote in Slate, “is more than heinous murder and guerrilla theater. It is a kind of macabre magic intended to create the illusion of enemies everywhere.”

Trouble is, Americans were freaking out long before 9/11. The reason? American conservatives, whose views are automatically accepted as conventional wisdom before eventually getting discredited, constantly see monsters in closets full of nothing but outdated fashions. “Iran has been at war with us for 27 years, and we have discussed every imaginable subject with them,” shrieked The National Review‘s Michael Ledeen during 2006’s Iranian-IEDs-are-killing-American-soldiers propaganda campaign. “We have gained nothing, because there is nothing to be gained by talking with an enemy who thinks he is winning. From [the Iranians’] standpoint, the only thing to be negotiated is the terms of the American surrender.”

Twenty-seven years–what a war! How on earth did we fail to notice it?

And “surrender”! How exactly would surrendering to Iran work? Wouldn’t they have to attack us first, you know, just for show? Do snotty remarks about Israel count as actual attacks with bullets and stuff? How would the Islamic Republic’s modest military occupy the United States and beat its 300 million heavily armed citizens into submission?

Enemies? Not yet. But we’re working on it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Why Does the Media Cover Up War Crimes?

In last week’s column I cited New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau as a prime example of what ails us: reporters who don’t report, a.k.a. journalists who love the government too much.

When Lichtblau found out that the Bush Administration was listening to Americans’ phone calls and reading their e-mail, he decided to hold the story. Instead of fulfilling his duty to the Times’ readers and running with it, he asked the White House for permission. By the time the NSA domestic surveillance story finally ran, 14 months had passed–and Bush had won the 2004 election.

Again, in a May 17th piece bearing the headline “FBI Gets Mixed Review in Interrogation Report,” Lichtblau is running interference for the government. “A new Justice Department report praises the refusal of FBI agents to take part in the military’s abusive questioning of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan,” begins the article, “but it also finds fault with the bureau’s slow response to complaints about the tactics from its own agents.”

“Abusive questioning.” “Harsh interrogation tactics.”

According to the Justice Department report, “routine” treatment of Guantánamo prisoners–witnessed by the FBI–includes “bending the detainee’s thumbs back and grabbing his genitals.” Military and CIA torturers chained detainees’ hands and feet together for as long as a full day, “left to defecate on themselves.” They terrorized them with dogs, stripped them and made them wear women’s underwear and subjected them to blaring music, freezing cold and searing heat.

Torture. Such a simple word. Why not use it?

Lichtblau’s “mixed review” appellation notwithstanding, the report by the Justice Department paints a shocking, uniformly negative portrait of a federal law enforcement agency whose officers react to appalling conduct with the Nuremberg defense–“I was just following orders.”

“Indeed,” reported U.S. News & World Report, “time after time, the report concludes that FBI agents saw or heard about numerous interrogation methods–from sleep deprivation to duct-taping detainees’ mouths to scaring them with dogs–that plainly violated their own agency’s code of conduct.” (Not to mention the Geneva Conventions.) Rather than report their scruples to someone who might raise hell and put a stop to the systemic torture at Gitmo and other U.S. concentration camps–i.e., the public–FBI agents turned to the criminals. Just like Lichtblau did with domestic spying.

“When [one] agent mentioned [a torture] incident to the general [at Guantánamo], the general’s response…was ‘Thank you, gentlemen, but my boys know what they’re doing.'” Ultimately the FBI, worried that agents could be charged with war crimes if they continued to witness the torture by CIA operatives and mercenaries, pulled its employees out of Gitmo and other camps. No one called a Congressman. None called a press conference.

FBI agents kept quiet–even when the CIA frat-boy-style torture tactics screwed up their interrogations.

In 2003 one FBI agent had “begin building a rapport” with Yussef Mohammed Mubarak al-Shihri, a Saudi citizen. Al-Shihri told the agent that female CIA agents had “forced to listen to the ‘meow mix’ jingle for cat food for hours and had a women’s dress ‘draped’ on him.” As usual, the agent turned to the torturer. “The agent said he confronted a female military intelligence interrogator who admitted to ‘poaching’ his detainee, but there was little more the agent could do. Following the incident, al-Shihri became uncooperative, and the agent said he never bothered to tell his superiors about the military interrogator’s actions.”

Turning a blind eye to torture. Watching passively as CIA goons destroy the trust of a possible material witness to terrorism. What “mixed review”?

As usual, the Newspaper of Record’s worst sins in Gitmogate are those of omission–the really weird stuff that could deprive the Administration of its few remaining supporters. “Buried in a Department of Justice report,” reported ABC News, “are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantánamo and interrogate Chinese Uyghurs held there.”

Like their Tibetan neighbors, the Uyghurs of western China are victims of government oppression, including mass executions. Throughout the 1990s, U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia urged Uyghurs to revolt against Chinese occupation. After 9/11, however, the U.S. agreed to help China capture and torture Uyghur independence activists–as a quid pro quo for not using its U.N. veto to stop the American invasion of Afghanistan. (There’s more about the U.S. betrayal of the Uyghurs in my book “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

“Uyghur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators,” said ABC. “When Uyghur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment.”

It’s a tale bizarre enough to make Rush Limbaugh blush: intelligence agents from communist China invited to an American military base, where they’re allowed to torture political dissidents in American custody, with American soldiers as their sidekicks. In light of China’s crackdown on Tibet during the run-up to the Olympics, it’s a tasty news tidbit. But it didn’t run in The Times–as far as I can tell, it only ran in one newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.

At the same time journo-wimp Lichtblau was penning his “balanced” take on the Justice Department’s bombshell report, the U.S. government admitted that it has more than 500 children in its torture and concentration camps. More than 2,500 children have gone through U.S. secret prisons since 2002, including at least eight at Guantánamo.

I know a lot of right-wing conservatives. We don’t share much political common ground, but it’s hard to imagine any of them thinking the indefinite detention and torture of children, against whom there is no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, is anything other than the behavior of a monster.

That’s the U.S. government, especially after 2001–criminal, corrupt and psychotic. But few Americans know the full extent of “their” government’s misdeeds, because state-controlled media chooses not to report them.

If a man screams in a government torture chamber, does he make a sound? Not if the only one who hears him is an American reporter.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

How the New York Times Won 2004 for Bush

Should the news media be patriotic? When a journalist uncovers a government secret, which comes first–national security or the public’s right to know?

In the United States, reporters consider themselves Americans first, journalists second. That means consulting the government before going public with a state secret. “When I was at ABC,” James Bamford told Time in 2006, “we always checked with the Administration in power when we thought we had something of concern, and there was usually some way to work it out.”

In a new book about the Bush Administration’s efforts to expand the president’s powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, the assumption that the press shouldn’t publish security-sensitive stories is so hard-wired that New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau accepts it as a given. But it’s a very American concept, and one that relies on the presumption that the U.S. government may make mistakes, but is largely a force for good. In other countries, the relationship between rulers and the press is strictly adversarial.

In “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice” Lichtblau unwittingly relates a depressing parable–his seeming obliviousness to conflict of interest is a bummer–describing the nation’s most prominent newspaper’s willingness to keep secrets for government officials, who turn out to be (shocker alert–>) lying. It’s a cautionary tale about journalistic nationalism, one of many (Judith Miller, anyone?) in which the Times transformed itself into Bush’s political slut.

A whore, at least, would have demanded money.

In 2004 Lichtblau and fellow Times reporter Jim Risen learned that the National Security Agency was spying domestically, on American citizens. The NSA, which uses sophisticated voice-recognition software and computer programs to intercept phone calls, fax transmissions, e-mail and even bank wire transfers, was supposed to limit its activities to foreign countries. Illegally expanding beyond its Congressionally-authorized mandate, Lichtblau writes, “the NSA had essentially gained access to the biggest telecom ‘switches’ in the country, using the agency’s data-mining technology to comb the huge trunks carrying massive volumes of traffic, in order to zero in on suspected dirty numbers and eavesdrop on them without warrants.”

It was a big story. Or it would have been, had the newspaper chosen to run it when it learned of it.

Naturally, it triggered alarms in official Washington when another Times reporter called the NSA for comment. Soon the agency’s director, General Michael Hayden, was calling the Times, asking it to censor itself. “Don’t run this story,” Administration honchos begged.

“The Times,” Lichtblau says, “had been through many contretemps in its long history over whether or not to publish newsworthy stories involving sensitive national security information and, despite the vitriolic charges from its critics, it was never a decision the paper made with reckless abandon. In more than a few cases, it has decided not to publish anything at all.”

Suckers.

For over a year, Lichtblau explains in an apparent attempt to justify himself and his employer to conservative critics, Times editors and reporters met repeatedly with White House officials to ask them why they shouldn’t spill the beans on the NSA’s domestic spying operation. That the program was illegal was pretty obvious. (Congress acknowledged as much by later voting to retroactively legalize it.) So was the lameness of the government’s argument against making the NSA’s activities public.

Declaring the Bush Administration “unpersuasive,” Lichtblau said: “To me, it was never clear what Osama bin Laden and his henchmen would learn–confirming, really–that the United States spy services were listening to them.” But the White House kept calling meetings, playing for time. Meanwhile, every morning, the Times came out without important news that its readers would care about–that their phone calls and e-mails were being monitored.

“Bush and ten senior advisors in the White House and the intelligence community would make personal pleas not to run the story in a series of meetings spanning 14 months, beginning in October of 2004 weeks before the presidential election,” Lichtblau says.
Weeks before the presidential election. You’d think the timing of the Administration’s pleas for self-censorship might have tipped off the Times’ editors that they were being used in order to ensure that Bush and the Republican Party won the election. Moreover, Lichtblau wrote, “We had reason to suspect that the White House was actively misleading us and that its impassioned pleas might have less to do with concern over national security harm than with the legal and political fallout that the story might trigger.” Gee, you think? And yet the paper’s editors refused to print it.

The Bush Administration, he argues, “had not yet suffered the kind of crippling body blows to its credibility that it would [by late 2005].” Yeah, well, not really.
Remember, this was late 2004. The U.S. had invaded Iraq in March 2003, a year and a half earlier, but the WMDs had never turned up. The paper’s own editorial page had been ranting on and on about the Administration’s perfidy. Credibility? What credibility? Besides, it wasn’t as if Bush was the first First Fibber. All presidents are serial liars. So are their subordinates. Why would the Times, or anyone else, believe them about anything?

As I read on, I kept thinking about an exchange I’d had with a fellow American reporter in Afghanistan in 2001. “Are you going to the press conference?” he asked me. A local warlord, part of the incoming Karzai regime, was about to give an update on the battle for Kunduz. “What for?” I asked him. “To get news,” he replied. “A press conference,” I shot back, “is the one place where you’re guaranteed not to learn anything. It is a vacuum-packed, perfectly news-free zone.” I spent the morning at the bazaar interviewing refugees, figuring they had less reason to lie than the Afghan official.

Anyway, the internal debate over whether to run the NSA domestic surveillance story came to an end in December 2005. Lichtblau, Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman and executive editor Bill Keller went to the White House, where they met with Condi Rice, General Hayden and a few other characters whom, if there’s any justice, will soon be in prison. This was followed by another rendezvous between the Big Dog himself, George W. Bush, and Taubman, Keller, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger. (Despite the obvious conflict of interest–readers who pay newspapers for the truth vs. government officials paid to lie–there’s no evidence that they considered refusing these meetings.) Deciding that they had been played long enough, Sulzberger and his lieutenants green-lit the piece.

By then, of course, Bush had won a second term. To some extent, he owed his victory to the “liberal” New York Times more than to Karl Rove. The Times, Extra! Magazine reported later, had also sat on another late-breaking “October Surprise” story that might have caused enough voters to change their minds to vote for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. That suspicious rectangular bulge in Bush’s jacket during his debate with Kerry, a NASA scientist who is an expert on such things had told the Times, was indeed an electronic transmitter that allowed Bush to receive remote coaching from Rove or someone else.

“A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were ‘pretty upset’ about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt [it] was ‘too close’ to the election to run such a piece,” reported Extra!.

The government doesn’t tell the truth to reporters, even on “background.” Why shouldn’t the media tell the truth to the American people?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Student Loans Crunch Starves Greedy Colleges

First came school vouchers, subsidizing private schools with public money. Now, as the economy contracts, the government faces mounting pressure to pour increasing amounts of our tax dollars into private colleges and universities as well.

The push comes from two fronts: a desire to make sure that student loans keep flowing in spite of the credit crunch, and to raise benefits for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are guaranteed an education under the GI Bill.

Student loans are a big segment of the banking industry, amounting to about $85 billion last year. Until recently, they were also hugely profitable. But the credit crunch has caused some lenders to pull out of the federal program. As a result, the pool of money for college loans available has fallen 13 percent.

Congress is considering various ways to make sure students can continue to borrow the money they need. The Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act of 2008 (ECASLA) would increase the amount lent directly by the government. Another Senate bill, supported by Bush, would let the government buy student loans from banks to free up capital for additional loans.

Other bills seek to make college more affordable for veterans, many of whom say they are getting screwed. “They were rather good at saying, ‘Join the Marines and get an education; you’ll have an opportunity to go to college,'” recalls Kevin Grafeld, 23, a part-time student from Long Island, New York. Despite serving five years in Iraq, he gets a mere $875 per month–not even enough to pay for the community college he attends as a part-time student. “I was 18 and a little naïve,” Grafeld told Newsday. A bill sponsored by Jim Webb of Virginia, a Democrat, would pay for tuition up to the cost of the most expensive public university in a veteran’s home state, plus room and board.

How much would these bills cost? It’s like Iraq: no one knows. Sponsors say the feds would actually come out ahead on ECASLA, earning a cool $450 million a year in interest and fees on the backs of college kids.

I have a better idea. Do nothing.

Student loans aren’t a solution to skyrocketing tuition. They’re its cause.
The economy may suck, but the last thing the nation’s colleges and universities need is more money. There are exceptions, but most are awash in cash.
It’s easy to see why: since 1980, tuition at private institutions has gone up at triple the rate of inflation, and twice the rate of people’s salaries. As Timothy Egan noted in The Times, “If the cost of milk had risen as fast as college since 1980…a gallon would be $15.”

Private schools, especially the elite, are getting an enviable return on their misbegotten windfall profits. Seventy-six colleges hold endowments over $1 billion. Harvard has $35 billion–more than the GDP of 100 of the world’s 179 nations.

Nationally, colleges got a 17.2 percent return on their investments in 2007–while spending a mere 4.6 percent of that tsunami of cash on their students.

Public schools are nearly as greedy. Over the last five years, they’ve hiked tuition 31 percent faster than inflation. According to the AP, it’s “the worst record on college prices of any five-year period covered by the survey dating back 30 years.”
Why do colleges raise tuition so much faster than the inflation rate? Because they can.

Since 1981, when President Reagan got rid of a financial aid system mostly based on grants (which don’t have to be repaid), easy credit on student loans has made it possible for any student to borrow as much as he or she needs–or, to put it another way, however much a college decides to charge. It’s simple supply and demand; with no downward pressure on tuition, the warlords of college have an overwhelming temptation to gouge.

And gouge they do.

No one seems to question the wisdom of lending tens of thousands of dollars at above-market compound interest rates to children whose employment history amounts to, at most, a year at Burger King. 17-year-old borrowers have no idea what they’re getting into; parents imagine (usually wrongly) that kids’ college degree will guarantee them high enough wages to pay it all off and then some.

The average college graduate comes out owing $24,200 in student loans. And that’s an average. Many owe more–much more–in a non-existent job market. Saddled with crushing monthly payments as high as a home mortgage in some areas, millions of young people are forced to move back home. According to a 2002 study for the student lender Nellie Mae, student loan debt forced 38 percent of college graduates to delay buying their first house, 14 percent to get married later, and 21 percent to wait until they’re older to have children.

Bankruptcy rates among young adults in their 20s are soaring, but default rates on student loans remain relatively low, under five percent. (Laws have been changed so that bankruptcy doesn’t relieve your obligation to repay student loans).
Students and taxpayers get poorer. Colleges get richer.

But what if the worst fears of the credit crunch worrywarts came to pass? What if the student loan system collapsed entirely?

For several years, few poor and middle-class kids would be able to afford college. To be sure, it would be a painful transition. Millions of kids would drop out, forced to defer their dreams. But it would be good in the long run–for the country and even for them.

College CEOs (let’s not call the heads of these mega-for-profit vampire capitalism firms mere “presidents”) who wanted their companies to survive would be forced to recognize the new market reality. They would streamline their operations and reduce wasteful spending so they could cut tuition and other expenses. As Harvard and other Ivy League schools have already begun to do, they’d dip into the hundreds of billions of dollars currently sitting idly and uselessly in endowment investment accounts. And tuition would drop.

The collapse of the student loan racket–banning them entirely would be ideal–could be one of the best results of the recession. But only if we let it happen.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL