Sunday, August 15, 2004
CARTOONS-POLITICAL.COM NEWS BLOG
BUSH ALLIES VOTE FOR CONTRACT TO CORPORATE EX-PAT
The Bush administration awarded a $10 billion Department of Homeland Security contract to Accenture, a company that based its headquarters in Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The move defied the President's promise to make sure everyone is "paying their fair share. As if the Administration's actions weren't enough, the White House's Congressional allies defeated legislation that would have stopped the contract. (from Daily Mislead)
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VP Dick Cheney has set a standard for War Profiteering that others can only dream about. By Mick Youther
"[As Secretary of Defense], Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer Halliburton to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade."-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
o "As secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon, steering millions of military dollars to civilian contractors. Two and a half years after Cheney left his federal job, he began cashing in on the very contracts that he helped initiate."-- Robert Bryce, Mother Jones, 8/2/00
o "[At Halliburton, Cheney] grew rich on government contracts and taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign partners - like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid Cheney $ 73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er, Dick Cheney."-- Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, 3/29/03
o "Dick Cheney was Halliburton CEO and largest individual shareholder when he left to take charge of George Bush. His business is war, and he will shape U.S. policy to achieve it. Halliburton will get a large chunk of the $200 billion cost of maintaining the troops that invade and occupy Iraq, and the lion's share of rebuilding the infrastructure…"-- Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/14/02
o "It is close to unprecedented for the government to have given so much of the solution to one contractor."-- Steven Spooner, a George Washington University professor who specializes in federal contracting, quoted by the AP, 8/4/02
o "After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for vice president, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36 million payoff for his final year of corporate service."-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
o "A recent rise in Halliburton's stock price -- which is up 50 percent since Bush began talking about war in Iraq 18 months ago -- has pushed the value of Cheney's options to more than $10 million."-- The Modesto Bee, 10/15/03
o "[Last fall] Republicans stripped the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision which would have held companies holding contracts with the U.S. government criminally accountable for price gouging….[For months] Democrats in the US Congress, have sought information about Halliburton's pricing techniques and contract procedures. The Bush Administration has failed to respond to multiple requests, and instead have stonewalled the public's right to know, while at the same time extending Halliburton's no-bid sweetheart deal."-- Apollo Alliance Special Report, 11/6/03
o "Republicans [on June 16, 2004] blocked an effort…to create stiffer criminal penalties for war profiteering.[The] bill would have created new penalties -- including up to 20 years in jail -- for government contractors convicted of inflating the cost of goods or services."( The Republicans said,"the provisions were simply too vague to be placed into federal law.")-- National Journal's CongressDaily, 6/17/04 ( What an excuse! If the wording in the amendment was "too vague", then change the wording-don't block the amendment. Make it absolutely clear that war profiteering is a crime and will be punished as such. )
Cheney's privatization of the military has made war profiteering a tempting career for anyone who passes through the ever-revolving door between business and government. If the current members of Congress won't do something about it, we need some new people in Congress.
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CHENEY LYING ABOUT HALLIBURTON INVOLVEMENT
Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly assured Americans that he has positively no involvement in directing billions of taxpayer dollars in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, his former employer. In September of 2003, He told Fox News Radio, "I don't have anything to do with the contracting process, and I wouldn't know how to manipulate the process if I wanted to." But, according to new evidence, Cheney's office "coordinated" the Halliburton contracts and had the Pentagon specifically seek its input in constructing what ultimately became a multi-billion-dollar contract.
According to the New York Times, the Pentagon discussed a $1.9 million planning contract with "senior Bush administration officials, including the Vice President's Chief of Staff". Before inking the deal, according to the Los Angeles Times, three companies were vying for the contract. But instead of following the normal competitive civil service contracting process, the Times reports that Bush administration political appointees overruled the advice of Army lawyers and simply gave Halliburton the contract. That decision was then brought to Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, who reviewed the contract and raised no objections to the non-competitive process.
Cheney still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton and still owns about 433,000 company stock options which could become more valuable as the company's revenues rise. That fact was enough to lead the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service to describe Cheney's continued financial ties a "potential conflict of interest."
And yet despite all these questions, the Bush administration's allies formally blocked any testimony from Halliburton employees about the matter. Specifically, when Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) presented a slate of witnesses to the House Government Reform Committee, they were prevented from appearing by Republicans. That move led Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to demand the appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the situation.--- ( from Daily Mislead )
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From "This Is the Fight of Our Lives" by Bill Moyers
The House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold. The pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. Working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
For a long time, it has been the promise of America that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.
I don't have to tell you that now a profound transformation is occurring in America. We are being subjected to a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power. A broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control, with little public debate.
Elizabeth Drew says, "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years has been in the preoccupation with money." When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price. If you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill, you pay higher prices for a broad range of products and you pay taxes that others have been excused from paying. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so.
This is a class war. And, William Simon who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury declared it a generation ago. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less.... it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
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For the sake of political gain, the Bush White House has undermined the War on Terror by blowing the cover of key U.S. intelligence mole Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in order to leak secret information to the American media that would justify raising the terror alert level one week after the Democratic National Convention. The arrested 25-year-old Pakistani al-Qaeda computer engineer "had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch key al-Qaida operatives."(MSNBC) In the process, several wanted suspects from Osama bin Laden's terror network were allowed to escape compromising U.S. national security. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed Bush White House involvement.
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Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel (conservative, election 2000 Bush voter) writes:
Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush, they are really voting for the architects of war - DickCheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.
I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory. It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. John Kerry is at least an educated man, well read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be. People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush.
Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing.
Bush is the most secretive president in the 20th century and his administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?
This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration.
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"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, physicist
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Bush Tolerates Smear Campaign
A group of 13 men who never served with Kerry, calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), is airing an ad calling him a liar and alleging that he did not deserve the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. The allegations contradict all of Kerry's living crewmates, medical records and independent investigation by historian Douglas Brinkley. Republican Sen. John McCain, who was also smeared by Bush during his 2000 campaign, called the group's advertisement "dishonest and dishonorable". But asked specifically whether Bush would join McCain in condemning the ad, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan demurred.
It turns out that homebuilder Robert Perry provided $100,000 of the $158,000 the group reported through the end of June. Perry has worked closely with Bush's chief political advisor Karl Rove and has long-standing ties to many close Bush associates. He has contributed to Bush's last four campaigns.
SBVT is planning the release of a new book as a sequel to their dishonest TV ads. The book is expected to expand on the same discredited allegations featured in the TV spot. It is co-authored by Jerome R. Corsi, an inveterate creator of bigoted comments ("Ragheads are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters) and long time Republican operative John O'Neill a 30-year anti-Kerry crusader who was recruited by Nixon in the 1970s to be a counterfoil to Kerry when he was advocating for the end of the Vietnam War.
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Letting His Cronies Off
Just one day after attending a church service where the topic was the excesses of wealth, President Bush joked about taxes saying, "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway". This quip was a departure of just four months ago when he claimed he " wanted the IRS to get after those who don't pay taxes and wanted everybody paying their fair share." The New York Times reported earlier this year, "an independent analysis of new Internal Revenue Service data shows that tax enforcement has fallen steadily under Bush with fewer audits, fewer penalties, fewer prosecutions and virtually no effort to prosecute corporate tax crimes." The richest corporations, a major source of Bush contributions, are under less scrutiny. The WP reports, "among corporations with assets of at least $250 million, audit rates slid to 28.98 percent last year from 33.68 percent in 2002. In 1995, more than half were audited." And Bush's policies go further than lax enforcement. In some cases, it means forcing the IRS to settle cases on terms favorable to companies with shady behavior. For example, the NYT reports a recent agreement between the government and a tech company "required the IRS to cooperate with the company...in keeping its shareholders uninformed on some basic terms of its stock-option plan, which an audit said enriched the four top executives by as much as $20 million in total." The St. Petersburg Times reports that while the IRS audited fewer corporations, small businesses and partnerships last year, it did audit more individual taxpayers. In fact, Bush is increasing audits specifically of the working poor. As Gannett News Service reports, the administration has unveiled a plan "to conduct pre-certification audits for families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the proposed documentation for school lunches."
The NYT's David Cay Johnston notes "through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich - the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans."
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The Bush administration awarded a $10 billion Department of Homeland Security contract to Accenture, a company that based its headquarters in Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The move defied the President's promise to make sure everyone is "paying their fair share. As if the Administration's actions weren't enough, the White House's Congressional allies defeated legislation that would have stopped the contract. (from Daily Mislead)
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VP Dick Cheney has set a standard for War Profiteering that others can only dream about. By Mick Youther
"[As Secretary of Defense], Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer Halliburton to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade."-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
o "As secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon, steering millions of military dollars to civilian contractors. Two and a half years after Cheney left his federal job, he began cashing in on the very contracts that he helped initiate."-- Robert Bryce, Mother Jones, 8/2/00
o "[At Halliburton, Cheney] grew rich on government contracts and taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign partners - like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid Cheney $ 73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er, Dick Cheney."-- Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, 3/29/03
o "Dick Cheney was Halliburton CEO and largest individual shareholder when he left to take charge of George Bush. His business is war, and he will shape U.S. policy to achieve it. Halliburton will get a large chunk of the $200 billion cost of maintaining the troops that invade and occupy Iraq, and the lion's share of rebuilding the infrastructure…"-- Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/14/02
o "It is close to unprecedented for the government to have given so much of the solution to one contractor."-- Steven Spooner, a George Washington University professor who specializes in federal contracting, quoted by the AP, 8/4/02
o "After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for vice president, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36 million payoff for his final year of corporate service."-- Robert Scheer, Salon.com, 7/17/02
o "A recent rise in Halliburton's stock price -- which is up 50 percent since Bush began talking about war in Iraq 18 months ago -- has pushed the value of Cheney's options to more than $10 million."-- The Modesto Bee, 10/15/03
o "[Last fall] Republicans stripped the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision which would have held companies holding contracts with the U.S. government criminally accountable for price gouging….[For months] Democrats in the US Congress, have sought information about Halliburton's pricing techniques and contract procedures. The Bush Administration has failed to respond to multiple requests, and instead have stonewalled the public's right to know, while at the same time extending Halliburton's no-bid sweetheart deal."-- Apollo Alliance Special Report, 11/6/03
o "Republicans [on June 16, 2004] blocked an effort…to create stiffer criminal penalties for war profiteering.[The] bill would have created new penalties -- including up to 20 years in jail -- for government contractors convicted of inflating the cost of goods or services."( The Republicans said,"the provisions were simply too vague to be placed into federal law.")-- National Journal's CongressDaily, 6/17/04 ( What an excuse! If the wording in the amendment was "too vague", then change the wording-don't block the amendment. Make it absolutely clear that war profiteering is a crime and will be punished as such. )
Cheney's privatization of the military has made war profiteering a tempting career for anyone who passes through the ever-revolving door between business and government. If the current members of Congress won't do something about it, we need some new people in Congress.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
CHENEY LYING ABOUT HALLIBURTON INVOLVEMENT
Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly assured Americans that he has positively no involvement in directing billions of taxpayer dollars in no-bid contracts to Halliburton, his former employer. In September of 2003, He told Fox News Radio, "I don't have anything to do with the contracting process, and I wouldn't know how to manipulate the process if I wanted to." But, according to new evidence, Cheney's office "coordinated" the Halliburton contracts and had the Pentagon specifically seek its input in constructing what ultimately became a multi-billion-dollar contract.
According to the New York Times, the Pentagon discussed a $1.9 million planning contract with "senior Bush administration officials, including the Vice President's Chief of Staff". Before inking the deal, according to the Los Angeles Times, three companies were vying for the contract. But instead of following the normal competitive civil service contracting process, the Times reports that Bush administration political appointees overruled the advice of Army lawyers and simply gave Halliburton the contract. That decision was then brought to Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, who reviewed the contract and raised no objections to the non-competitive process.
Cheney still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton and still owns about 433,000 company stock options which could become more valuable as the company's revenues rise. That fact was enough to lead the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service to describe Cheney's continued financial ties a "potential conflict of interest."
And yet despite all these questions, the Bush administration's allies formally blocked any testimony from Halliburton employees about the matter. Specifically, when Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) presented a slate of witnesses to the House Government Reform Committee, they were prevented from appearing by Republicans. That move led Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to demand the appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the situation.--- ( from Daily Mislead )
_____________________________________________________________________________________
From "This Is the Fight of Our Lives" by Bill Moyers
The House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold. The pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. Working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
For a long time, it has been the promise of America that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.
I don't have to tell you that now a profound transformation is occurring in America. We are being subjected to a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power. A broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control, with little public debate.
Elizabeth Drew says, "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years has been in the preoccupation with money." When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price. If you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill, you pay higher prices for a broad range of products and you pay taxes that others have been excused from paying. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so.
This is a class war. And, William Simon who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury declared it a generation ago. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less.... it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
For the sake of political gain, the Bush White House has undermined the War on Terror by blowing the cover of key U.S. intelligence mole Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in order to leak secret information to the American media that would justify raising the terror alert level one week after the Democratic National Convention. The arrested 25-year-old Pakistani al-Qaeda computer engineer "had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch key al-Qaida operatives."(MSNBC) In the process, several wanted suspects from Osama bin Laden's terror network were allowed to escape compromising U.S. national security. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice confirmed Bush White House involvement.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel (conservative, election 2000 Bush voter) writes:
Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush, they are really voting for the architects of war - DickCheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.
I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory. It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. John Kerry is at least an educated man, well read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be. People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush.
Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing.
Bush is the most secretive president in the 20th century and his administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?
This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, physicist
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Bush Tolerates Smear Campaign
A group of 13 men who never served with Kerry, calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), is airing an ad calling him a liar and alleging that he did not deserve the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. The allegations contradict all of Kerry's living crewmates, medical records and independent investigation by historian Douglas Brinkley. Republican Sen. John McCain, who was also smeared by Bush during his 2000 campaign, called the group's advertisement "dishonest and dishonorable". But asked specifically whether Bush would join McCain in condemning the ad, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan demurred.
It turns out that homebuilder Robert Perry provided $100,000 of the $158,000 the group reported through the end of June. Perry has worked closely with Bush's chief political advisor Karl Rove and has long-standing ties to many close Bush associates. He has contributed to Bush's last four campaigns.
SBVT is planning the release of a new book as a sequel to their dishonest TV ads. The book is expected to expand on the same discredited allegations featured in the TV spot. It is co-authored by Jerome R. Corsi, an inveterate creator of bigoted comments ("Ragheads are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters) and long time Republican operative John O'Neill a 30-year anti-Kerry crusader who was recruited by Nixon in the 1970s to be a counterfoil to Kerry when he was advocating for the end of the Vietnam War.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Letting His Cronies Off
Just one day after attending a church service where the topic was the excesses of wealth, President Bush joked about taxes saying, "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway". This quip was a departure of just four months ago when he claimed he " wanted the IRS to get after those who don't pay taxes and wanted everybody paying their fair share." The New York Times reported earlier this year, "an independent analysis of new Internal Revenue Service data shows that tax enforcement has fallen steadily under Bush with fewer audits, fewer penalties, fewer prosecutions and virtually no effort to prosecute corporate tax crimes." The richest corporations, a major source of Bush contributions, are under less scrutiny. The WP reports, "among corporations with assets of at least $250 million, audit rates slid to 28.98 percent last year from 33.68 percent in 2002. In 1995, more than half were audited." And Bush's policies go further than lax enforcement. In some cases, it means forcing the IRS to settle cases on terms favorable to companies with shady behavior. For example, the NYT reports a recent agreement between the government and a tech company "required the IRS to cooperate with the company...in keeping its shareholders uninformed on some basic terms of its stock-option plan, which an audit said enriched the four top executives by as much as $20 million in total." The St. Petersburg Times reports that while the IRS audited fewer corporations, small businesses and partnerships last year, it did audit more individual taxpayers. In fact, Bush is increasing audits specifically of the working poor. As Gannett News Service reports, the administration has unveiled a plan "to conduct pre-certification audits for families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the proposed documentation for school lunches."
The NYT's David Cay Johnston notes "through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich - the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans."
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