Fox in The Chicken Coop?

The following was posted to my Yale class list. For me the bellwether here was Gonzales' recommendation that torture was ok. This set the pattern for what has most disgraced the Bush administration and which shames Americans -- we have had it even here in Brooklyn in the administrative detention of Muslims with abuse by one of the same guards who turned up doing his thing at Abu Ghraib -- and reeks of the comparable abuses in South America during the 1970s and early 1980s. One of my current doctors is Chilean and, I imagine, would have even stronger things to say about the nomination of this man as Attorney General. A hackneyed image, but setting the fox to guard the chicken coop . . . ? Ed Kent


Alberto Gonzales and Trickle-Down Secrecy
Retro vs. Metro: Divided Times

By Chris Colin

Where critics of previous administrations zeroed in on one or two of the president's blunders - Watergate, Monicagate - President Bush's detractors have felt obliged to sort their multiple grievances into themes; among the richest of these has been secrecy. The nomination for attorney general of White House legal counsel and longtime Bush friend Alberto Gonzales, a prime architect of Bush's shrinking transparency over the years, suggests no departure from this pattern, as much of the press has already noted. But the Gonzales nomination also represents movement toward a broader culture of opaqueness - the sort that seeps beyond Pennsylvania Avenue, some fear, and that tolerates more and more irregularities like those seen in last month's election.

Gonzales' locking down of information - more or less on par with outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft's - has been well-documented. A recent Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press report claims he's demonstrated "a penchant for strictly regulating access to government and executive-branch information." Meanwhile, the Project on Government Oversight has noted that Gonzales "played a leading role in attempting to chill whistleblowers who contact Congress with information about corporate fraud and abuse." The patterns go back years: The Houston Chronicle reported that Gonzales was crucial in getting then-Governor Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 - a strategy that allowed the governor to avoid revealing his 1976 drunken driving arrest.

Structurally, Gonzales' resistance to open government bears no direct connection to, say, the lack of open-source coding in our e-voting machines or Florida's failure to publish a comprehensive purge list well before the election. But that's not to say one has nothing to do with the other. What Gonzales steps into as successor to Ashcroft is a fierce and pervasive culture of wagons circled and lips sealed. Critics say it's not just the direct consequences they fear - the secret energy task force meetings, the revision of Freedom of Information Act guidelines, the expansion of the president's ability to classify documents - but an indirect trickling down. Ultimately, they argue, citizens will no longer feel entitled to know what their elected officials do, and by extension how these officials are elected in the first place.

We've arrived at an interesting moment in the history of information. Americans have long demonstrated their abundant mistrust of politicians; now, as evidenced by a recent Pew survey, it seems we've come to mistrust the media in nearly equal measure. Without a trusted institution to press for open government and transparent elections, the duty falls largely to the attorney general - caretaker of the FOIA and by extension "the right of the public to know what its government is doing," as MSNBC put it.

Having an Obligation to Obey the Law

A hard week in a long Iraq mission
Increasingly, US military experts say Americans need to prepare for a
decades-long counterinsurgency campaign. By Dan Murphy
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1224/p01s03-woiq.html?s=hns
--
What the Nazis did not get and the neocons are not getting now is that most people obey the law because they feel that they have an obligation to do so -- not through fear of punishment. The essential point is made again and again in my field of philosophy of law. In his classic study, The Concept of Law, noted British legal theorist, H.L.A Hart made this point by distinguishing between what he called "having an obligation to obey" the rules of law versus "being obliged" (i.e. coerced) to do so:

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/hart.html

For whatever reason most of us in a law abiding society obey most of its rules (we may speed on the parkways, but we don't murder, steal, whatever). When the rule of law is undermined or a society feels that rules are being imposed from without -- watch out! This is precisely what undid the Nazis with the resistance during WW2 and it is what will undo the U.S. occupation of Iraq. There is no way we can pacify Iraq's three conflicting religious/ethnic communities, as much a threat to each other as we are to them.

Affordable Housing?

I just noticed a TV news report that housing starts are on the decline and that the price of new homes is down to $268,000. I wonder how many Americans can afford that tab and what the minimum cost of buying a home is these days?

One summer long ago I had the pleasure of building small affordable houses in New Britain, Connecticut -- the same summer I was loaned out to a blaster for several weeks and learned how to blow things up and, thus, am worried at the prospect of terrorist attacks in NYC, which is totally unprepared to defend itself or tell its citizens what they should do in the light of even the most minimal disaster scenario.

Back to building. Such jobs were what we college students did in those days, as the pay of blue collar workers was substantial enough to buy the small, but snug houses that we were building. I made sure that we did things right -- properly ditching around basements so that water would not build up there and seep into furnace and recreation areas. These houses were priced so that an average worker on his salary could afford them along with a car to commute wherever to work.

Now such amenities lie beyond the scope or interest of builders, politicians, or others who might want to provide for those in the lower 50% of income levels in the U.S. We hear much about ownership out there. I am dubious. I know the scene here in NYC where the great bulk of people are forced to rent -- or homeless -- and buying into a co-op or whatever is increasingly becoming the privilege of our millionaires -- I am on a co-op board and know whereof I speak.

In contrast we partially support two families scraping by in the North East Kingdom of Vermont by keeping going at a loss a two family house there which fell our way several decades ago. We have not raised rents since then (although the taxes and other expenses mount), because to do so would be to make homeless two families who are hard pressed to make ends meet now.

I cringe at the two level society that we are creating. In our once old-time comfortable run down building in the Upper West Side of Manhattan I now meet routinely nannies in our elevators en route in and out to their jobs or to our laundry room. I notice many a guy out there on the subway with one or more little ones -- obviously the breadwinner is the wife in minority families these days, caring for someone else's children, ringing up sales at a minimum wage at a cash register, or hopefully sometimes with some sort of more comfortable and rewarding job.

American democracy? Tyranny of a majority -- or of our oligarchy?

Falluja Delenda Est

Falluja residents returning home

Iraqis return to their homes in Falluja for the first time since a US-led assault left much of it in ruins. Full story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4119885.stm
--
The reports on the conditions in Falluja, and of its 250,000 former residents stranded in the countryside -- many hovering in tents in freezing weather -- is nothing short of a major disaster. The city is a wreck. Three of its four water purification plants have been totally destroyed -- the one partially left is non-functional. Electricity is not available. Neither the insurgents nor mined buildings have been rooted out. Hundreds or more of corpses have been buried. One could not imagine how the residents returning -- when they are allowed to do so -- will feel about the Bush invasion and continuing occupation -- unless one were living in a comparably sized American city that had been similarly devastated? Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy as cited by Machiavelli in The Prince)

Spitzer Certifies Columbia Adjunct Union

[One of the less known academic disgraces in North America outside of faculty circles is that higher education is being seriously jeopardized by the corporatization of our colleges and universities. Increasingly tenured full-time positions are being reduced while harassed graduate students to unemployed PH.D.s are being used to 'teach' an increasing percentage of classes -- to the detriment of both students and those struggling to survive on minimal incomes while rushing from college to college trying to keep up with an overload of courses -- with deteriorating quality of teaching as the outcome. The 'CEOs' of higher education in the meantime are making out like bandits with salaries and perks ranging towards $500,000 a year! Needless to say many of our best potential scholars and teachers are peeling away to viable alternative careers. No one without an independent income need apply. The union at Columbia and elsewhere is the obvious outcome of this grossest of injustices. Ed Kent]

From: "GSEU"
To:
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 4:22 PM
Subject: [cgeu] NY ATTORNEY GENERAL ELIOT SPITZER CERTIFIES UNION MAJORITY
AT COLUMBIA U.

On December 17, 2004, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
certified that a majority of graduate teaching and research assistants at Columbia University have signed cards in support of unionization.

Teaching and Research Assistants voted to unionize in 2002 with Graduat Student Employees United (GSEU/UAW-Local 2110). However, two years later their ballots were thrown out after the National Labor Relations Board, currently dominated by Republican appointees, reversed earlier precedents ruling that teaching assistants and research assistants are not employees.

Referring to the NLRB decision Spitzer said, "The decision is wrong. The Labor Board is doing everything - left, right, and center - designed to undercut workers' rights to organize."

In a light moment, after signing off on a document verifying the results of the card count, Spitzer joked, "It wasn't even close. There are no hanging chads. There won't have to be a recount. The overwhelming majority have signed UAW cards." Spitzer added that he will send the results of the card count to Columbia University and urge them to recognize the union.

With the route of an NLRB-conducted election closed off to the teaching and research assistants, the Union is now pressing Columbia to agree to recognize the union based on a union membership card count tha demonstrates majority support for the union and to bargain a contract.

Attorney General Spitzer was joined by Phil Wheeler, Regional Director for the UAW and members of Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU/UAW), the group of teaching and research assistants working to form a union for TAs and RAs at Columbia.

"Tomorrow I will grade 25 term papers from the class I teach and I am going into debt on my salary of $18,000 a year," said Dehlia Harris, a graduate Teaching Assistant in the Philosophy Department. "It is time for Columbia to recognize that we work and bargain with us over fair wages, equal pay for equal work, job descriptions, childcare for working parents, and healthcare benefits."

Wheeler pledged UAW support, "The TAs and RAs will decide their next steps, and our whole International Union will stand by them. We aren't going to sit idle while these workers are denied their rights by this very rich and powerful university."

________________________________________
Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions
cgeu-list@cgeu.org / admin@cgeu.org
join/unsubscribe at www.cgeu.org

Wrong CUNY Conract Target

I have sent a note to Barbara urging that the focus of our contract concerns be re-directed to our trustees and to those who appointed them. It is they who control the purse strings. As some know, I have already pointed out to them that they risk down-grading CUNY _faculty standards_ by failing to make adequate financial provisions for both our junior faculty -- who are likely to take the next better job offer that comes along -- and our adjuncts who are stretched beyond any rational commitment to a teaching career. And contact your local political reps, too, by phone, if possible, or in person. We also have 60 community boards in NYC -- each of which has an education committee to alert along the same lines. There are a number of NYC candidates running for various offices now that should respond attentively to your calls. You are welcome to use the College Conversation list for communication, if you wish or are banned from the old UFS one. I am also sending this by blind copy to the adjunct list. Ed Kent


Dear PSC Colleagues,

In the last few weeks, many of you have written or called me about your anger at CUNY management's unacceptable economic offer of 1.5% over four years, and now their cancellation of last Friday's bargaining session. Many of you have also asked what you can do to support the bargaining team's message that we will not accept a minimal contract.

Here's one thing to do immediately: Go to the PSC website:

www.psc-cuny.org

and click on the image that says "Contract Now!" You'll see the easy instructions for sending an
email to Chancellor Goldstein demanding a serious economic offer. With only three or four clicks and a quick filling-in of your address, you can email the letter directly to the Chancellor. We will have to do more than send letters if we are to win a good contract in the current anti-labor and anti-intellectual environment, but don't underestimate the impact of a flood of letters this week.

Send the letter now--it takes less than five minutes. An outpouring of these letters in the last few days of the semester will convey a powerful message. Don't let the semester end without management's hearing from you on the critical issue of our contract.

In solidarity,
Barbara Bowen
PSC President
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Retirement Planning

On the subject of investments towards retirement, one should always look with suspicion towards the source of advice. Needless to say Wall St. has an interest in engaging people in making investments -- there are fees and all sorts of spillover benefits for those on the street to be had when the market is active -- "churning" they call it.

Further, even well-intentioned, self-interested 'experts' have a terrible record for getting it wrong. My father went into Wall St. as a broker and investment counselor following upon his WW1 military service. I well recall him noting that he had seen the crash coming, gotten all his clients out of the market, put aside enough monies to live with my mother in northern Vermont for a year until things blew over. They did not -- the Great Depression endured until well into WW2 when finally our war production restored employment and for a time after WW2 with the European and Japanese factories destroyed, we had an edge that produced our post-war "peace and prosperity" (Ike's campaign slogan). Unfortunately we slid along without upgrading our production equipment (particularly in steel) and suddenly found ourselves at a competitive disadvantage against the formerly destroyed manufacturing competitors who did modernize their plants rather than grabbing short-term profits.

Back to my father. One of his clients was the leading academic market expert at Yale. My father had been given half of his stock portfolio to manage. My father's half was rescued by his selling as noted above, but the other manager had stayed in and had wiped out even the monies that my father had rescued.

The bottom line Bush move in prospect looks to be to persuade those under 40 that they can enhance their retirements by having a portion of their Social Security taxes converted to individual investment accounts. There is no formula yet, but manifestly this 'you can win the lottery approach' may be instituted in one form or another at a tremendous cost to someone -- probably future generations. It has been tried before -- in Chile and in Britain. In the former the government is now having to rescue those who struck out and in Britain where Thatcher did her thing, they eventually had to pass legislation _limiting_ the take in broker fees to 20% of the value of the investments. The obvious end result is that brokers will make out like bandits with such a scheme and the rest of us will pay the damage -- or more accurately the 40 and unders will be stuck with the bill.

Sadly I have watched some of my Yale classmates now retired bemoaning the fact that they blew it with the 401(k)s by sticking with the market when it dive bombed in 2000. How sad to be stuck at the end of a lifetime this way. One has to be both savvy AND lucky to survive in such gambling games -- and that is what the stock market is. The only ones sure to profit are those pulling in fees -- not those hoping to get rick quick.

Better to find out how to hook up with TIAA or some other dependable independent pension fund that offers 'no fee' change of holdings with flexibility along the way so that one can move towards more conservative options when one nears retirement: http://www.tiaa-crefinstitute.org/
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Marketing Dangerous Things

NEWS ANALYSIS

Pricey Drug Trials Turn Up Few New Blockbusters

By ALEX BERENSON

The $500 billion drug industry is stumbling badly in its

core business of finding new medicines, while aggressively

marketing existing drugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/business/18assess.html?th

It is pretty clear that our drug industry has felt secure in its profit-making drive to peddle whatever to whomever by whatever means. One sees the daily deluge of ads pushing this or that high priced drug that one is supposed to pressure one's doctor into prescribing.

The most recent Medicare rip-off on drugs placed no limits on prices to be charged by our U.S. drug companies and moves are afoot by the Republicans to block imports from Canada -- one of the many nations that bargains down our greedies to more reasonable pricing of their newest.

The rash of disasters now hitting the drug industry of me-too-for-profit items (not doing more than existing low cost generics) may bring divine retribution for such dangerous profiteering unless, working through the Bush administration, the industry can put trial lawyers out of business as the last recompense for families who have lost not only loved ones, but bread winners in this profit-making extravaganza.

Now on to the tobacco industry, which has been killing nearly half a million Americans each year and which is now looking for new outlets for its deadly products overseas.

And then there is our profiteering with such lovely weapons as land mines which going on killing innocents for decades, as do uranium contaminated artillery shells, and our polluting of the global atmosphere -- "to maintain the American economy" -- guess who?

Such madness can occur only in a nation that has completely cut itself off from the eyes of the world -- an 'American democracy' that manifests itself in a 'vampire' culture that feeds not only on its own but any others that it can seduce with its deadly products!

Needless to say self-regulation by these psychopathic greedies will not do it! Perhaps divine intervention is the only way. There are some biblical (prophetic) precedents for curbing such murderous hubris! Certainly there are increasing numbers of those out there who believe we have such retribution coming. Imagine ten of those suitcase nuclear weapons that the Bush administration has declined to collect from the disbanded former Soviet Republics going off simultaneously in major U.S. cities -- at least our guys in Iraq would be relatively free from the fall out. It is obviously a very different kind of homeland security that we need than that tainted ex-police commissioners or their equivalents can provide. People have been conditioned to kill monsters and that is what we as a nation are rapidly becoming. Machiavelli warned his princes against making themselves hated. It is hate that kills!

Time for NY Democrats to Go to Work

It is ironic that our 'blue' state is being run into the ground by Republican executives -- Pataki and Bloomberg -- who would rather bankrupt us with stadia than fight for our fair share of taxes (our net outflow from NYC being more than $11 billion to the red states) to support our schools, colleges, affordable housing, medical care now at risk, police protection against terrorists, or even adequate food for our kids!

I am beginning to settle on some candidates that look to me to be the best. However, we are up against all those right wing think tanks that are not only spinning support for their candidates, but plotting ways to divide our natural constituencies -- encouraging ethnic rivalries, generational conflicts (what do you think Social Security 'reform' is all about?), non-voting (no difference between Democrats and Republicans, so go for Nader, the Greens, or stay home in protest?), class war by other names (attack on trial lawyers, racism galore, misogyny revitalized -- anti-abortion, gay rights used as spoilers), attacks on civil liberties to shut us all up (all Muslims are terrorists or financial supporters of same).

I have never seen a more vicious move against all things that I have associated as being good qualities of our American heritage and appeals to our worst impulses (genocide upon which our nation was founded; slavery both by race and class by which it was funded).

I shall try to be straight forward with my preferences as I appeal for better things. But now is the time for us to get started. This is intended only as a preliminary observation.

Comments? --

Tax and Spend? Help People -- or Kill Them!

Bush has a rather more favourable starting point: the strongest economy in the world and a welfare state which is, to British eyes, laughably parsimonious. Social security costs consumes 4.4% of America’s economic wealth - in Britain, it stands at 8.2%.

Take, for example, the last study showing that 12.5% of Americans lived in poverty last year - up from 12.1% the year before.

[The above are excerpts from the Sunday Scotsman which I posted yesterday - again below. I first became conscious of the vast difference in the relative support systems of Britain and the U.S. through having worked first as a teen in the Bethnal Green Community Center in the East End of London with many kids (my age) who were partial war orphans. They were well fed and Britain had been at work reconstructing the bombed out housing there, which had been a primary Nazi target area - designed (unsuccessfully) to demoralize the Brits. Five years later I worked in a comparable poverty area in the Manhattanville Community Center in West Harlem with another little group of young teens who were 'welfare' orphans (fathers banned from their homes by the 'no man in the house welfare rule' following their loss of jobs to the returning war veterans) constantly hungry, forced to steal to eat, not medically treated, living in deteriorated tenements, and destined all but 3 of a dozen to die violently by their 40s. I saw then and see now the horrendous contrast between societies that give a damn for their poverty level inhabitants (Western Europe) and ours, which wishes them either incarcerated or dead by one means or another -- inadequate medical care to execution. And then there are our killing games abroad -- Viet Nam, Panama, Iraq . . . ? And we wonder why the world is beginning to despise us? Christians???? Ed Kent]

"Thatcherism - Stateside" is written by Fraser Nelson and has some great insights into what the new attack on social programs in the U.S. is really all about. It's wonderful because it comes from the viewpoint of a person who lived under Thatcher...and the big question in the U.K. is "what CAN you cut...your social programs are practically non-existent anyway"... [sent on by Joy Catherine]

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1448142004
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/