Deep Blade Journal

Family relative in one of the affected units

Photo by Gregory Rec of the Portland Press Herald. The Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion is based here. We have a relative by marriage who is with this unit.

Two from Maine died and several were wounded in Tuesday’s bomb attack on the mess tent in Mosul, Iraq. We know that our relative was not killed. But we have no word yet on his condition. This is gut wrenching. We send our prayers to his family, and to all of the families who must suffer through this, especially during the Christmas season.

Reporters Patrick Cockburn and Jeremy Redmond describe the scene in a story posted on Counterpunch:

Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosion blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Bill Nemitz, columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine writes today about the attack:

With one cruel blow, the insurgents who prowl outside the perimeter of this godforsaken place hijacked a rare chance for true celebration and set it on a collision course with yet another round of tearful eulogies, another set of gut-wrenching final roll calls….

Nemitz closes his column by describing the prayers and sentiments we all now share:

Some [prayers] will be for those who left for midday chow Tuesday with no idea they were sitting down to a full-blown tragedy.

Some will be for peace, now more than ever, in this place where long ago civilization was born.

And some will be that this base, this hell on Earth, will soon loosen its grip on these proud but weary Mainers.

Sunday afternoon, two days before he went to lunch and emerged dazed, disoriented but otherwise uninjured, Chaplain David Sivret welcomed a visitor to his decked-out chapel, poured from his ever-present pot of hot coffee and said the words that will pull the 133rd through this tangle of tinsel and torture.

“It’s time,” Sivret said with a weary smile. “It’s time for all of us to come home.”

I concur completely with the Chaplain’s remarks.

For anyone who is interested, I have posted a pdf file containing a letter on Social Security that I have just faxed to my representative and senators in the US Congress. If you have Acrobat Reader installed, you can download the letter here.

I have not forgotten that two weeks ago I promised four entries on the over-hyped “scandal” at the UN and the real corruption behind the destruction of Iraq. I have two more parts largely written and they should be up by Christmas. The last should be up by New Years.

Meanwhile, there have been some interesting developments… The week before last on Monday December 6, Five Republican members of the House of Representatives backed Norm Coleman’s call for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to resign.

Just as momentum seemed to be building for Annan’s head, the US Ambassador to the UN John Danforth threw cold water on the fire while outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell made his last swing by the UN to check on preparations for the Iraqi election. According to the Chronicle story cited, “Danforth said the White House is not pressing for Annan’s departure now”.

Functioning with UN imprimatur of the barely, if at all tenable occupier-designed election is more important than an immediate sating of Republican dogs looking to snack on Annan. This may be a sick joke, but it seems to be how the Republicans are choosing to run this show. See this post in Empire Notes for more…

Atrios asks, “Why Does the Media Hate Social Security?“

This won’t mean much after President Bush is done with it.

President Bush plans to spend his political capital in order to fulfill a long-time Republican dream of crushing the Social Security program. This sport is as old as Alf Landon’s 1936 attempt to unseat President Roosevelt. Landon’s big-newspaper supporters threw up all sorts of scare tacticts against Social Security in that thankfully losing effort.

I agree with many commenters to the Eschaton post cited above that corporate media owners and other rich folks hate the program because, as one comment writer says, “They don’t need SS and could not care less about it’s fate.”

I’d go farther and say that many rich Republicans view the program with jealousy. It’s money the government reserves for the whole spectrum of little people that they can’t appropriate for themselves or shut off by fiat. They have to pay the payroll tax, but they can’t discipline workers by threatening to cut their Social Security. At least not until now – Bush may have enough political and media juice lined up to force large benefit cuts for future retirees in order to dump a large number of dollars from payroll taxes into the coffers of Wall Street investment casinos.

The media mythology that has become part and parcel of reporting on Social Security (see FAIR’s recent go-round with CBS news for phoniness on the issue) has developed over nearly a decade of hysterical crisis mongering by the libertarian reactionaries at the Cato Institute. Their innocuously named website, http://www.socialsecurity.org/ is the media clearinghouse for framing the terms of the debate. Here is a sample of the Cato hustle:

Social Security is going bankrupt. The federal government’s largest spending program, accounting for nearly 22 percent of all federal spending, faces irresistible demographic and fiscal pressures that threaten the future retirement security of today’s young workers. According to the 2003 report of the Social Security system’s Board of Trustees, in 2018, just 14 years from now, the Social Security system will begin to run a deficit. That is, it will begin to spend more on benefits than it brings in through taxes. Anyone who has ever run a business–or balanced a checkbook–understands that when you are spending more than you bring in, something has to give–you need to start either earning more money or spending less to keep things balanced. For Social Security, that means either higher taxes or lower benefits.

You bet, lower benefits. That stings me hard because the minimal existing benefits are absolutely essential to my own low-dollar retirement plan. Media outlets are likely to swallow and regurgitate this official-sounding crap hook, line and sinker.

Bush last week at the economic dog show (no critical voices present) reiterated the mythology:

One of the things that we heard today from experts is that the Social Security system is safe today, but is in serious danger as we head down the road of the 21st century. And this problem has got to be confronted now. And we heard from people that know what they’re talking about on this stage this morning, saying that it is a far easier problem to manage today than it will be if we continue postponing solutions.

In 1950, there were 16 workers paying for every beneficiary. Today, there are about three, and when the younger workers retire, there will be only two workers per beneficiary. That should be a warning signal for those of us who are charged with having to confront problems and not pass them on to future Congresses or future generations. The system becomes untenable within a relatively quick period of time. The Social Security system is in the black today, but in the long-term, has $10.4 trillion in unfunded liability — that’s trillion with a “T.” That means that a 20-year-old worker today is being promised retirement benefits that are 30 percent higher than the system can pay. By the year 2018, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than the government collects in payroll taxes. And once that line into red has been crossed, the shortfalls will grow larger with each passing year. We have a problem.

First, the whole thing about number of working people per retiree that you hear again and again and again is a huge red herring. The supposedly dramatic downward shift in the ratio over seven decades does not mean anything until you look at the so-called trust fund ratio. Then, the shift is not nearly so dramatic because over the years worker productivity has increased, as has the payroll tax rate. Four decades from now the program will have to seek additional funding sources to replace a slowly declining ratio. And as the SSA trustees admit, there is great uncertainty in these projections. While it’s worth paying attention and making wise fiscal choices that Bush is not now making vis-a-vis the idiotic tax cuts, this is hardly a crisis today.

The Bush “solution” of private accounts for worker-beneficiaries in stock market investments has a dually contractictory premise. First, there is no way that private accounts would solve Social Security’s woes if the economy were bad. But if economic times were good enough to produce historical-average returns for stocks, then there would be no Social Security funding crisis!

Here are some additional references worth reading for facts on the phony crisis…

First, a nice little site with lots of links to reports from the reality-based world: The Bruce Web: Social Security is not Broke

See also The Trillion Dollar Hustle: Hello Wall Street, Goodbye Social Security. By Thomas Frank. From Harpers, June 2002. Excerpt:

You’ve heard this many times before, of course: from the Beardstown Ladies to the Raging Bull website, this was the ideological fantasy of the last decade. This time, though, it is being replayed not to sell us on some mutual fund or hot tech issue but to convince us to bet it all–to liquidate what remains of the welfare state, head down to the great casino, and put our trust in Greenspan. Social Security privatization is to be the trillion-dollar hustle, Wall Street’s final joke on those who just can’t shake the free-market superstition.

Finally, lots and lots and lots of documents are linked here: Social Security Website Links from EBRI

Mystery woman used as excuse for Homeland Security nomination withdrawal may not exist.

“The White House has been unwilling to discuss any specifics of the nanny herself…”

It’s easy to see why the White House needed this diversionary excuse, real or not, for Kerick’s departure. Deep questions concerning the former nominee’s personal, professional, and business practices have flooded New York newspapers in the week since the withdrawal.

Two blogs are really keeping track of the juice on Kerick, Talking Points Memo and Steve Gilliard.

Gilliard has many postings including this one that contains a laundry list of his dealings:

Kerick…

*had mystery dealings with companies for contracts which didn’t make sense

*slept with a subordinate, then punished supervisors who admonished her

*had work done by Paulie Walnuts and his crew on an apartment he couldn’t afford

*rented an apartment in the shadows of Ground Zero as a love shack

*borrowed $18k from friends which he never reported

*was wanted for arrest over a condo deal

*associated with people linked to organized crime

*left Iraq after 3 months and failing to train the police

*allegedly threatened a second mistress and stalked her.

…All while running New York’s City jails and police department.

I’d like to expand for a moment on Kerick’s Iraq tenure and this interesting post by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Marshall points out that Kerick was in the thick of the wild early days of the US regime in Iraq then known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. In May 2003, Bush sent him to Baghdad to run the Interior Ministry. Before he left there just three months later, well short of the effort to which he had originally committed, he had he spent 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to train Iraqi police. Into a country awash in small arms, he imported revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police from vendors in Jordan at exorbitant cost to the US taxpayer.

Marshall writes,

It’s been known for a longtime that the Iraqi Interior Ministry under the CPA was rife with corruption. Lots and lots of US tax dollars went missing.

In November 2003, Deep Blade Journal issued its extensive Reference Article on U.S.-Iraq Business Relationships which included the comment, “…there seems to be deep distrust of the financial management of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Numerous articles and reports have appeared in the last few weeks that raise a plethora of serious questions about the conduct of the occupation….”

In one of those articles, Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush: Lawmakers Fear U.S. Is Losing Control of Funds, Jonathan Weisman and Anitha Reddy of the Washington Post reported on Thursday, October 9, 2003 that

Among the dozens of projects in the proposal is a State Department plan to spend $800 million to build a large training facility for a new Iraqi police force. Management fees alone would run $26 million a month, while 1,500 police trainers would cost $240,000 each per year, or $20,000 each per month. DynCorp of Reston is likely to get the contract.

“All I can say is it’s mind-boggling,” James Lyons, a former military subcontractor in Bosnia, said of the opportunities for private contractors. “People must be drooling.”

Kerick apparently was well suited, for a while anyway, to help initiate the taxpayer sink hole that the colonial project in Iraq represents. A full investigation of Kerick and the disaster he helped spawn clearly is called for.

The black-belt nominee had a “nanny problem”, but that’s not all

Bernard Kerik with Bush Dec. 3 during the Homeland Security nomination announcement

Sure, the obvious irony of having a Secretary of Homeland Security, the highest official in charge of immigration, with a history of immigration law violations is too much even for this venal administration.

But, as the Times reports, the nanny problem only scratches the surface of what is potentially some very rotten pulp:

In just the last three years, Mr. Kerik, 49, made millions of dollars, mainly through his partnership in a security consulting firm headed by Mr. Giuliani and by serving on the board of a stun-gun manufacturer that has been seeking to do business with Homeland Security. Most recently, Mr. Kerik sold $5.8 million of stock in the stun-gun company.

Democracy Now! had a great segment on Kerik last Tuesday, leading with a troubling quote reported by Newsday on October 20, 2003, which had Kerik saying, “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend”.

Sounds perfect for the Bush approach to “security”.

To top it off, Kerik has a history of misuse of personnel under his authority. In the same interview on Democracy Now!, Ellis Henican of Newsday discusses various incidents, including this striking example:

…the story essentially is that Ms. Regan, who is his [Kerik's] publisher, lost a cell phone one day at Fox; and the story goes that he sent out some New York Police detectives to go into the homes in the evening of the hair and make-up people at the Fox news channel to investigate the disappearance of that cell phone.

The entire segment is worth a read or listen.

So at 8:30pm on Friday night, the very bottom of the week’s news cycle, the Kerik nomination was withdrawn as quietly as possible.