Luke Mullins - U.S. News & World Report
RealtyTrac has released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report for October:
Foreclosure filings — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 279,561 U.S. properties during the month, a 5 percent increase from the previous month and a 25 percent increase from October 2007. The report also shows one in every 452 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in October
“We’ve seen sharp declines in new foreclosure filings after legislation mandating delays to the foreclosure process was signed into law in several states — most notably in California, where overall foreclosure activity was down by double-digit percentage points for the second straight month in October, and where default filings were 44 percent below October 2007 levels,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “Despite this, October marks the 34th consecutive month where U.S. foreclosure activity has increased compared to the prior year.
“While the intention behind this legislation — to prevent more foreclosures — is admirable, without a more integrated approach that includes significant loan modifications, the net effect may be merely delaying inevitable foreclosures. And in the meantime, the apparent slowing of foreclosure activity understates the severity of the foreclosure problem in these states.”
Which states have the highest foreclosure rates?
1. Nevada: 1 in 74 homes
2. Arizona: 1 in 149 homes
3. Florida: 1 in 157 homes
4. California: 1 in 231 homes
5. Colorado: 1 in 390 homes
6. Georgia: 1 in 391 homes
7. Michigan: 1 in 396 homes
8. New Jersey: 1 in 410 homes
9. Illinois: 1 in 410 homes
10. Ohio: 1 in 417 homes
By THOMAS WATKINS
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) - Firefighters were racing early Friday to push back a wind-whipped wildfire that destroyed about 80 homes and a college dormitory in the tony community of Montecito, injured four people and forced thousands to flee the longtime celebrity hideaway.
The fire broke out just before 6 p.m. Thursday and spread to about 2,000 acres - more than 3 square miles - within hours, destroying dozens of luxury homes and parts of a college campus in the foothills of Montecito, just southeast of Santa Barbara. About 5,400 of the community's 14,000 residents were evacuated and more could be forced to flee if the fire spreads, said Terri Nisich, a spokeswoman with the Santa Barbara County Executive Office. (continue reading)
WASHINGTON: Even as Al Qaeda strengthens its hub in the Pakistani mountains, its leaders are building closer ties to regional militant groups in order to launch attacks in Africa and Europe and on the Arabian Peninsula, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday.
The director, Michael Hayden, identified North Africa and Somalia as places where Qaeda leaders were using partnerships to establish new bases. Elsewhere, Hayden said, Al Qaeda was "strengthening" in Yemen, and he added that veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had moved there, possibly to stage attacks against the government of Saudi Arabia.
He said the "bleed out" from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also extended to North Africa, raising concern that the countries there could be used to stage attacks into Europe. Hayden delivered his report in a speech to the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, and it offered a mixed assessment of Al Qaeda's ability to wage a global jihad. (continue reading)
Hamas Fires Heavier Rockets at Israel
Reuters
The armed wing of the Islamist group said it fired five Grad rockets at an Israeli city, the longest-range weapon it has claimed to shoot at the Jewish state. (continue reading)
by Brian Morton - The Smirking Chimp
Well, that didn't take long, did it? We probably shouldn't find it surprising that when a candidate assailed by all as "the most liberal member of the Senate" (even though he wasn't--think Bernie Sanders, the socialist of Vermont) names a hard-charging fighter as his chief of staff, the conservatives get up in arms and the concern trolls in the mainstream media scratch their chins and act "troubled."
Eight years ago a new president, having won barely a majority of electoral votes and having lost the popular vote, named one of the most partisan, divisive men in America as his attorney general. Fourteen years ago, Newt Gingrich and his pals came into power with a net gain of 54 House seats and eight seats in the Senate and called it a revolution, and until they shut down the government in 1995, it was unheard of to question whether or not they might "overreach."
If you add up the gains made by the Democrats in the last two years, they more than overtake the so-called "revolution," considering they come into office with a popularly elected president as well. But now we hear about "overreach" and how "divisive" president-elect Barack Obama's new chief of staff might be?
Last I checked, the minority party does not get a say in who runs the incoming president's White House. Rahm Emanuel may not be the most well-liked man in Washington, but there's one thing that for damn sure will happen: Those particular trains will run on time. I personally know someone who was the recipient of an Emanuel tirade, complete with screaming and standing on top of his desk. (Emanuel, a former ballet student, reportedly would jump up onto it from a standing position as a way of making his point.) But if you're a new president and you want things to happen when you say they should happen, having someone like "Rahmbo" at your back isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Remember that in Powertown the people on the other side of the aisle may not always have your best interests at heart. Bill Clinton took almost four full years to get up to speed because of the failings of his first few months in office. He stumbled right out of the gate with gays in the military and "don't ask, don't tell," tripped over hurdles like Lani Guinier and Joycelyn Elders, and then the health-care debacle brought everything to a screeching halt. If anything it was Republican overreach in 1995 that got Clinton rolling.
Success breeds success. If the new president can ignore the carpings of the media and focus on pushing through some obvious wins (the State Children's Health Insurance Program, expansion of embryonic stem-cell research, a ban on torture), it will make it easier to slide the tough ones through a little later. And Obama needs to remember that, as it was with Bill Clinton, the Republicans opposing him also want what they feel is best for the country, but that doesn't mean they want him to succeed at what he's doing. Not for nothing did they spend the last two years in the Senate bottling up in filibuster every and any bill that came down the line, then complaining to voters about a "do-nothing Congress."
The biggest fear the GOP has is that Obama might actually turn out to be the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a side of Lyndon Johnson. Under FDR came Social Security and under Johnson came Medicare, two of the most popular programs in American history, programs seething conservatives like to call "socialism." When Bush leftovers say things like "My own hunch is that Obama is smart enough not to want to govern as a liberal," as former Bushie Peter Wehner told the Washington Post, they are projecting an America which exists only in their fond fevered dreams of 2002.
When the public says loudly enough that it wants "change," it certainly doesn't mean that it wants Bush-lite. Nobody voted for a government that only works half of the time, as opposed to hardly any of the time, like we've had for the last five years.
Already Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona is making demands of the nascent Obama administration, saying he will filibuster any Supreme Court nominees who are more liberal than current justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and David Souter (the latter of whom was nominated by the first president Bush). Yet let's note that not one of the most programmatic conservatives on the bench--Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, or John Roberts--faced any kind of filibuster from Democrats when they were in the minority.
Maybe it's because we've been so far to the right for so long that the center isn't what it used to be, but as of Nov. 4, that has changed. And perhaps the first task the Democrats can take on to show this is the case is to show Sen. Joe Lieberman the door.
by Alan Bisbort - The Smirking Chimp
In November 2006, when the Republican Party lost full control of Congress, I suggested that gloating was not in order. After all, George W. Bush was still in the White House and Dick Cheney was still pulling his strings. I'd wanted to switch on the TV so I could watch the high-paid pundits spin the defeat into victory for the Republicans, as they always do.
At the time, I wrote, "Just as I reached for the knob, I thought, nah, I can't even stand to look at these people long enough to gloat at their expense. I loathe what they've done to my country so much that I want them to go away, crawl back under their rocks. In a better world, I would never have to think of them again, never again have to gaze upon the faces of Kate Harris, Ricky Santorum, 'Macaca' Allen or any of the others."
The history-making election of last week — which, despite its inevitability, caught all the high-paid pundits by surprise again — would seem to offer many more reasons to gloat. Some of the worst of the worst are gone. Sen. Libby Dole (R-NC). Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO). Rep. Bill Sali (R-ID) (yes, Idaho!). Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA). Two GOP incumbents in New Mexico. Two in Michigan. Two in New York. Two in Ohio. Three in Virginia.
There are five new non-Republican Senators, and counting (Kay Hagan, Mark Warner, Jeanne Shaheen, Tom Udall, Jeff Merkley). The race in Minnesota between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may go to a recount, and the race in Georgia (Georgia!) between incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin is headed to a runoff. Sen. Ted Stevens, the convicted felon just reelected in Alaska, will likely retire or be retired by the Senate Republican Caucus. Six House seats, as of this writing, are still undecided. Two will have runoffs in December. The Democrats will have at least 255 seats in the new house, up from 203 before the 2006 election.
And yet, gloating should be put aside, because the task ahead for the Democratic Congress and President-elect Barack Obama is too monumental. Though Obama has yet to be inaugurated, the honeymoon is already over. How does one clean up after a national disaster on the scale of George W. Bush? Where do you even begin?
A few things that need to be done during President Obama's first term of office: Enact a national energy policy; repair international alliances with the goal of getting help in extracting ourselves from Iraq; open talks with Iran and ratchet down the martial rhetoric; rejoin the majority of nations taking proactive steps to combat global warming; restore cuts in international family planning and AIDS funding; make Africa and South America foreign policy priorities, as both continents will suffer the brunt of climate change impacts; don't dictate agendas to other nations; ignore the high-paid pundits because they are always wrong; avoid wedge issues like gay marriage, school prayer, flag burning, etc. The American people are ready to be treated like adults.
Other priorities: Harry Reid has to be replaced as Senate Majority leader. For the past four years he's deferred to a divisive president on some core issues: Iraq, budget requests, torture, habeas corpus — even when his party had the majority. He has also coddled Joe Lieberman, who must be demoted. The Supreme Court has to be brought back toward the center; resuscitate the Justice Department and EPA; the FBI needs to focus more attention on right-wing domestic terrorism (that's where our next attack will come from).
Still, let's take a moment to examine the roll call of those who've been jettisoned during the George W. Bush years: Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, John Bolton, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, Katherine Harris, Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu, Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson, George "Macaca" Allen, Duke "Of Slime" Cunningham, Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, Mark "Page Boy" Foley.
Sweet relief.
The one thing we are not hearing from Congress or from incoming president Barack Obama in the current economic crisis facing the country are the words "anti-trust" and "public ownership."
From the moment the crisis first struck, with the near collapse of AIG, the mantra has been that companies like AIG, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, etc.--and more recently General Motors Corp. and Ford--are "too big to fail." That is, it is argued that these companies are so huge that if they were to collapse into the rubble they deserve to be, it would damage the nation irreparably.
The question is, if that is genuinely the case, why were they allowed to be that big in the first place, and why aren't we rethinking that policy?
It's not as though they got that way through organic growth by being successful at what they did. Hardly. GM was the quintessential result of a merger of smaller automakers. Ford grew too, by acquiring the competition, most recently Volvo. Most, if not all of those acquisitions were first vetted and approved by the Federal Trade Commission and found to be acceptable as a matter of economics and public policy.
In the banking industry, which is regulated, the picture is even worse, with the government first opening the door to the creation of national banking companies, and then routinely approving the gobbling up of one after another regional or even national bank by another. At some point we reached the point where the giants in the industry--Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.--were able to say, when they ran into trouble, that allowing them to fail would have dire consequences for the national economy. This kind of extortion should never have been allowed to happen.
First of all, the argument for national banks never made sense for ordinary people, and wasn't necessary for large customers either. Large corporate fundings have always been done by bank consortia, and this could have been accomplished with the nation's banking industry fragmented into small state-chartered institutions. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals always lose when a bank is national in scale. It is much more costly to handle the banking business of small enterprises and individual families than it is to handle the business of huge corporate clients, with the result that the major banks have made it costlier and costlier for small customers to do business with them.
The answer is clear. Bigness is fundamentally bad when it comes to capitalism. There is a point where any company in any industry becomes too big for it to be socially acceptable. Big companies not only attempt to behave in a monopolistic fashion by destroying or buying up the competition, both nationally or, as in the case of a retailer like WalMart or a bank like Citibank, locally, using their huge financial power to locally underprice the competition and drive them out of business (after which they are free to gouge the local customer base). They also ride roughshod over local political interests, demanding tax breaks, zoning waivers, etc. This being the case, the government should simply not be allowing corporations to achieve such scale and market dominance.
Companies, whether banks, car makers, or media companies, should never be allowed to grow to a point that they become "too big to fail." If that can be said about any company, whether because of the assets it holds, or because of the number of people it employs, it is time to break it up.
Think of GM. If GM were ripped up into six or seven competing companies, it is certain that at least one of those smaller entities would be producing electric cars by next year. The Saturn plant already made one, the Impact, that was wildly popular (see the excellent documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car"), and if left to its own devices to sink or swim, could probably be cranking those out in volume for the 2010 model year.
Some companies would certainly fail. But that's what is supposed to happen in a capitalist system.
This piece is not meant to be a paen to capitalism. But having said that, if you're going to have capitalism, which is the ruling ideology here in the US of A, you have to let it function as intended. As soon as the government comes in and starts encouraging the establishment of monopolies or quasi-monopolies, and preventing the failure of poorly managed enterprises or dying industries, as it is doing in the case of the banking and automotive sectors, it is no longer true capitalism.
That could work, too. Many democratic countries, including Japan, Sweden, France and Germany, have the concept of shared governance of corporations, in which large corporate entities are partially owned and run by government, and of planned economies, in which certain sectors are deliberately protected and promoted by government policy. The US has moved in that direction with the investment by the government in nine of the country's largest banks, and in discussions to provide $25-50 billion in financial assistance to the major US auto companies. But in the US case, the government is studiously avoiding demanding a role in running those companies. It is by design only a "passive" investor.
This is the triumph of ideology over rationality and the public interest. I recently interviewed a number of investment strategists in the course of working on an article for an investment magazine. They all had the same advice for worried investors: invest in shares of the "magic nine" banks that are recipients of tens of billions of dollars in bail-out money from the federal government. As they all point out, the government's stake in these banks means that they will not be allowed to fail, and moreover, they are in a unique position to use their flush capital reserves to acquire, at fire sale prices, the assets of smaller banks that are being left to sink or swim in the current credit crisis and recession. That is not a free market. It's a government program to reduce the competition in the banking sector and hand all the business over to a favored few giant banks.
Now that would be okay if the government, in return for its investment, were taking a management role in those favored banks. But it is not. Congress, the Bush administration, and, so far at least, the incoming administration of Barack Obama, have not been demanding a management stake in any of the companies that are getting bail-out funding. If the government takes ownership positions at all, it is taking non-voting shares in those companies, solely in the hope of someday getting some of the invested money back by selling those shares.
This is not just a rip-off of the taxpayer. It is a craven program to enrich big investors in the bailed-out enterprises, while putting control of the nation's economic destiny increasingly into a smaller number of hands of people whose interests are not even aligned with the national intereest (these are, after all, all transnational corporations only nominally headquartered in the US).
There is, of course, another reason that companies should never be allowed to become "too big to fail." That is political clout. The US political system is already largely an owned-and-operated subisidiary of corporate America. When companies become as large as AIG or GM or Bank of America, they also gain a disproportionate influence over the political apparatus that is an order of magnitude larger than their share of the national GDP. It's not just that they have limitless money to donate to political campaigns. They also, by their size, are able to dispense political favors in virtually every congressional district, much as the Pentagon has been doing for the past half century, and also to threaten national havoc if they don't get their way.
Don't expect much in the way of scrutiny of this bailout process from the corporate media, by the way, which has been engaged in the same process of national consolidation for the past few decades. But clearly, the public needs to wake up and start demanding that if our money is going to be used to bail out these corrupt and horrifically managed enterprises, we the people need to have a controlling interest in running them, so that they are run in our interest. Better yet, we should be demanding that these bumbling colossuses be broken up into little pieces, and then left to sink or swim on their own like the rest of us.
This week and into next, NorthCom and NORAD are conducting a joint exercise called "Vigilant Shield '09."
The focus will be on "homeland defense and civil support," a NorthCom press release states.
From November 12-18, it will be testing a "synchronized response of federal, state, local and international partners in preparation for homeland defense, homeland security, and civil support missions in the United States and abroad."
NorthCom is short for the Pentagon's Northern Command. President Bush created it in October 2002. (The Southern Command, or SouthCom, covers Latin America. Central Command, or CentCom, covers Iraq and Afghanistan. And the new AfriCom covers, well, you get the picture.)
Vigilant Shield '09 "will include scenarios to achieve exercise objectives within the maritime, aerospace, ballistic missile defense, cyber, consequence management, strategic communications, and counter terrorism domains," the press release states.
NorthCom's press release also says that other participants in the exercise include the U.S. Strategic Command's "Global Lightning 09," which is a plan to use nuclear weapons in a surprise attack.
The Pentagon's "Bulwark Defender 09" is also involved in the exercise, and it is a cyberspace protection outfit of the Pentagon.
Something called the "Canada Command DETERMINED DRAGON" also is participating, as is the California National Guard and California's "Golden Guardian."
California's involvement appears to center around planning for a catastrophic earthquake.
"Under the leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger and direction of his Office of Homeland Security, the nation's largest state sponsored emergency exercise will take place November 13-18," a press release from the governor's office states.
"Golden Guardian 2008 tests California's capability to respond and recover during a major catastrophic earthquake. The Golden Guardian 2008 full-scale exercise scenario focuses on a simulated, catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake along the southern portion of the San Andreas Fault."
NorthCom is being shy about giving out additional information about Vigilant Shield '09. When I called for a fact sheet on it, I was told there was none.
But the Pentagon did issue such a fact sheet for Vigilant Shield '08.
Last year's exercise included "the simulated detonation of three nuclear dispersal devices." The fact sheet stressed the need to support a "civilian-led response" and to "exercise defense support of civil authorities," including involvement in "critical infrastructure protection events" and coordinating "Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection activities."
That fact sheet ended by saying: "There will be minimal deployment of active duty forces and no crossborder deployments. We anticipate little to no direct impact on local communities."
NorthCom has been in the news lately, after the Pentagon designated to it a battle-tested fighting unit from the war on Iraq. This appears to be against the law, according to the ACLU, since the army isn't supposed to be patrolling our own country.
On top of that, NorthCom was up to its eyeballs in getting peace groups spied upon.
"The security people at USNORTHCOM . . . had begun noticing some trouble at a few military recruiting events in 2005," Eric Lichtblau recounts in Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice. "Military officials at NORTHCOM asked their counterparts at CIFA [the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity] to ping their powerful new database-do a broader study and find out how many episodes of violence and disruption were actually imperiling their recruiters."
And NorthCom even was in the loop at the Republican Convention in St. Paul.
Is it too much to ask Congress to look into NorthCom?
By Robert Parry - Consortium News
Press reports say Barack Obama may retain George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a gesture to war-time continuity, bipartisanship and respect for the Washington insider community, which has embraced Gates as something of a new Wise Man.
However, if Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, “politicized intelligence.”
During a campaign interview with the Washington Post, Obama said, “I have been troubled by … the politicization of intelligence in this administration.” But it was Gates – as a senior CIA official in the 1980s – who broke the back of the CIA analytical division’s commitment to objective intelligence.
In a recent book, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman identifies Gates as the chief action officer for the Reagan administration’s drive to tailor intelligence reporting to White House political desires. A top “Kremlinologist,” Goodman describes how Gates reversed a CIA tradition of delivering tough-minded intelligence reports with “the bark on.”
That ethos began to erode in 1973 – with President Richard Nixon’s appointment of James Schlesinger as CIA director and Gerald Ford’s choice of George H.W. Bush in 1976 – but the principle of objectivity wasn’t swept away until 1981 when Ronald Reagan put in his campaign chief, William Casey, as CIA director.
Casey then chose the young and ambitious Robert Gates to run the analytical division. Rather than respect the old mandate for “bark on” intelligence, “Bob Gates turned that approach on its head in the 1980s and tried hard to anticipate the views of policymakers in order to pander to their needs,” Goodman wrote.
“Gates consistently told his analysts to make sure never to ‘stick your finger in the eye of the policymaker.’”
It didn’t take long for the winds of politicization to blow through the halls of CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
“Bill Casey and Bob Gates guided the first institutionalized ‘cooking of the books’ at the CIA in the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on tailoring intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America, and Southwest Asia,” Goodman wrote.
“Casey’s first NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] as CIA director, dealing with the Soviet Union and international terrorism, became an exercise in politicization. Casey and Gates pushed this line in order to justify more U.S. covert action in the Third World.
“In 1985, they ordered an intelligence assessment of a supposed Soviet plot against the Pope, hoping to produce a document that would undermine Secretary of State [George] Shultz’s efforts to improve relations with Moscow. The CIA also produced an NIE in 1985 that was designed to produce an intelligence rationale for arms sales to Iran.”
Hyping Soviet Power
One of the key distortions pushed by Casey and Gates was the notion that the Soviet Union was a military behemoth with a robust economy – rather than a decaying power with a shriveling GNP. The logic of the Casey-Gates position was that exaggerating the Soviet menace justified higher U.S. military spending and U.S. support for bloody brush-fire wars – central elements of Reagan’s foreign policy.
Since the mid-1970s, the CIA’s analytical division had been noting cracks in the Soviet empire as well as signs of its economic-technological decline. But that analysis was unwelcome among Reagan’s true-believers.
So, in 1983 when CIA analysts sought to correct over-estimations of Soviet military spending – to 1 percent a year, down from 4 to 5 percent – Gates blocked the revision, according to Goodman.
From his front-row seat at CIA headquarters, Goodman watched in dismay as Gates used his bureaucratic skills to consolidate the agency’s new role underpinning favored White House policies.
“While serving as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986, Gates wrote the manual for manipulating and centralizing the intelligence process to get the desired intelligence product,” Goodman stated.
Gates promoted pliable CIA careerists to top positions, while analysts with an independent streak were sidelined or pushed out of the agency.
“In the mid-1980s, the three senior [Soviet division] office managers who actually anticipated the decline of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s interest in closer relations with the United States were demoted,” Goodman wrote, noting that he was one of them.
“The Reagan administration would not accept any sign of Soviet weakness or constraint, and CIA director Casey and deputy director Gates made sure intelligence analysis presented the Russian Bear as threatening and warlike,” Goodman wrote.
These institutional blinders remained in place for the rest of the 1980s.
“As a result, the CIA missed the radical change that Mikhail Gorbachev represented to Soviet politics and Soviet-American relations, and missed the challenges to his rule and his ultimate demise in 1991,” Goodman wrote.
When the Soviet Union – the CIA’s principal intelligence target – collapsed without any timely warning to the U.S. government, the CIA analytical division was derided for “missing” this historic moment. But the CIA didn’t as much “miss” the Soviet collapse as it was blinded by Gates and other ideological taskmasters to the reality playing out in plain sight.
Goodman was not alone in identifying Gates as the chief culprit in the politicization of the CIA’s intelligence product. Indeed, Gates’s 1991 confirmation hearing to be George H.W. Bush’s CIA director marked an extraordinary outpouring of career CIA officers going public with inside stories about how Gates had corrupted the intelligence product.
There also were concerns about Gates’s role in misleading Congress regarding the secret Iran-Contra operations in the mid-1980s, an obstacle that had prevented Gates from getting the top CIA job when Casey died in 1987.
Plus, in 1991, Gates faced accusations that he had greased his rapid bureaucratic rise by participating in illicit or dubious clandestine operations, including helping Republicans sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in 1980 (the so-called October Surprise case) and collaborating on a secret plan to aid Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein (the Iraqgate scandal).
Despite significant evidence implicating Gates in these scandals, he always managed to slip past relying on his personal charm and Boy Scout looks. For his 1991 confirmation, influential friends like Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren, D-Oklahoma, and Boren’s chief of staff George Tenet made sure Gates got the votes he needed.
In his memoir, From the Shadows, Gates credited his friend, Boren, with clearing away the obstacles. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote. (Tenet’s help on Gates also earned him some chits with the Bush Family, which paid off in 2001 when Tenet was Bill Clinton’s last CIA director and was kept on by George W. Bush, whom he served loyally, if incompetently.)
After getting confirmed in 1991, Gates remained CIA director until the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. However, even after Bill Clinton removed him in 1993, Gates never wandered far from the Bush Family orbit, getting help from George H.W. Bush in landing a job as president of Texas A&M.
Damaging Documents
During the Clinton years, documents surfaced implicating Gates in questionable actions from the 1980s, but the new evidence got little notice.
For instance, the Russian government sent an extraordinary intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates had participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move that undercut President Carter.
“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, the classified Russian report said.
In the 1980s, Moscow was very interested in the U.S. dealings with the new Islamic government of Iran, a neighboring country to the Soviet Union.
In July 1981, the Soviets even shot down an Argentine-registered plane that strayed into Soviet airspace while delivering a supply of weapons from Israel to Iran with the Reagan administration’s secret knowledge and blessing.
The Russian allegation about Gates and the Paris meeting in October 1980 also didn’t stand alone. The House task force had other evidence from French and Israeli intelligence officials, as well as witnesses from the arms-trafficking field, corroborating reports of Reagan-Bush contacts with Iranian officials in Europe during Campaign 1980.
However, the House task force never followed up on the Russian report because when it arrived – on Jan. 11, 1993 – the chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, had already decided to get rid of the October Surprise case as part of a sweeping clean of investigations into alleged Reagan-Bush wrongdoing.
Years later, Lawrence Barcella, the task force’s chief counsel, told me that in late 1992 evidence implicating the Republicans in the October Surprise caper had begun pouring in, so much so that he urged Hamilton to extend the investigation several months.
Instead, Hamilton ordered the inquiry wrapped up – and the October Surprise allegations rejected – all the better to start the new Clinton administration with a bipartisan gesture to the Republicans.
Like much of the other incriminating evidence, the Russian report was shoved into a box and stuck in a remote Capitol Hill storage room. I discovered it in late 1994 after gaining access to the task force's documents.
By then, however, there was almost no media interest in the “old” scandals of the Reagan-Bush years. Not only were those stories dated, but many of the central players were either dead or – like Gates – out of government.
[For details on the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For the text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]
Iraqgate Scandal
Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration played off Iran and Iraq battling each other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.
Middle Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein’s procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce chemical weapons for the war against Iran.
Gates denied all the Iran-Iraq accusations in 1991, and Boren’s Senate Intelligence Committee never pressed too hard to check them out.
However, four years later – in early January 1995 – Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s alleged role in the Iraq shipments.
In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit.
“The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
Ironically, this same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.
Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. "Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
However, like the Russian report, the Teicher affidavit was never seriously examined or explained.
After Teicher submitted it to a federal court in Miami, the affidavit was classified and then attacked by Clinton administration prosecutors. They saw Teicher’s account as disruptive to their prosecution of a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson.
Gates benefited, too, from Official Washington’s boredom with – and even hostility toward – Reagan-Bush-I-era scandals.
Instead, the polite and personable Gates continued to enjoy influential protectors on both sides of the aisle, from Republicans around George H.W. Bush to Democrats like David Boren and Lee Hamilton.
Plus, some of Gates's CIA protégés, such as former Deputy Director John McLaughlin, were liked by Democrats as well as Republicans. (McLaughlin was a member of Obama’s intelligence advisory group during Campaign 2008.)
Great Timing
Gates’s connections – and his timing – served him well when he was placed on the Iraq Study Group in 2006 along with its co-chairs, Lee Hamilton and Bush Family lawyer James Baker. By fall 2006, the ISG was moving toward recommending a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Meanwhile, President George W. Bush found himself in need of a new Defense Secretary to replace Donald Rumsfeld, who had grown disillusioned with the Iraq War.
Though Rumsfeld was viewed publicly as a hardliner, privately he sided with his field commanders, Generals George Casey and John Abizaid, in favoring a smaller U.S. “footprint” in Iraq and a phased withdrawal. Rumsfeld put his views in writing on Nov. 6, 2006, the day before congressional elections.
With Rumsfeld going wobbly, Bush turned to Gates and – after getting Gates’s assurance that he would support Bush’s intent to escalate the war, not wind it down – Bush offered him the job.
Rumsfeld’s firing and Gates’s hiring were announced the day after the Nov. 7 elections and were widely misinterpreted as signs that Bush was throwing in the towel on Iraq.
Rumsfeld’s memo was disclosed by the New York Times on Dec. 3, 2006, two days before Gates was scheduled for his confirmation hearing. [See Consortiumnews.com’s "Gates Hearing Has New Urgency."]
But Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were so enthralled by the false narrative of Bush tossing over the ideologue (Rumsfeld) in favor of the realist (Gates) that they took no note of what the real sequence of events suggested, that Bush was determined to send more troops.
Gates was whisked through to confirmation with no questions about the Rumsfeld memo and with unanimous Democratic support. Sen. Hillary Clinton and other senior Democrats praised Gates for his “candor.”
Within a few weeks, however, it became clear that Bush – with Gates’s help – had bamboozled the Democrats.
Not only did Bush dash the Democrats’ hopes for a bipartisan strategy on Iraq by junking the ISG recommendations, but he chose to escalate by adding 30,000 new troops. Instead of negotiating with Iran and Syria as the ISG wanted, Bush sent aircraft carrier strike groups to the region.
For his part, Gates joined in pummeling the Democrats by suggesting that their legislation opposing the "surge" was aiding and abetting the enemy.
“Any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks,” Gates told reporters at the Pentagon on Jan. 26, 2007. “I’m sure that that’s not the intent behind the resolutions, but I think it may be the effect.”
During Campaign 2008, Gates also opposed Obama’s plan to set a 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq.
Nevertheless, Gates remains a favorite of the Washington insiders, many of whom – like Lee Hamilton – have expressed warm support for the idea of keeping him on at least for the early part of the Obama presidency.
If the President-elect is serious about taking that advice, he first might want to review the extensive evidence of Gates’s devious behavior and consider whether Gates deserves the trust of the American people – and their newly elected government.
U.S. workers' lives are beginning to look a lot like they did 100 years ago when 14-hour days were the norm.
Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson's character in the 1980 film The Shining, should get credit for popularizing (and making terrifying) a proverb that dates as far back as the mid-1600s: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Nicholson's character sure looked like he could have used a vacation before his psyche disintegrated and he went on a murderous rampage.
In the real world, the danger isn't that we'll start obsessively and repeatedly typing proverbs at the Overlook Hotel before taking an ax to the door (one would hope), but that our country's hard-working denizens will keep getting sicker, sadder, less productive and more miserable.
Medical and poll-based evidence indicates that we seriously need relief. Work-related stress can lead to sudden heart attacks, obesity, anxiety and depression. A World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School study last year put the United States at the top of the list of depressed (or otherwise mentally disordered) countries, while the Gallup Daily Happiness-Stress Index finds that the only consistent upswing in mood occur when Americans get some time off on the weekends or holidays.
As John de Graaf, executive director of the Seattle-based advocacy group Take Back Your Time, puts it, Americans are "time-starved and vacation-starved."
Americans put in more hours at work than any other nation, surpassing even the workaholic Japanese. We average nine more weeks of labor per year than our working counterparts in Western Europe, who get at least 20 paid days of vacation each year.
Finland tops the list of vacation-supporting industrialized nations with 30 paid vacation days per year after the first year of work, plus 14 paid national holidays, according to a July 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. (This is in addition to the possibility that the country might soon grant "love holidays" so that some couples can rekindle passions and have kids.)
Canada and Japan are near the bottom of that list, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days, while the United States has the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation that does not have a mandatory minimum of vacation time. In fact, out of the world's 195 independent countries, 137 have some kind of vacation/annual leave legislation in place.
Each year, de Graaf and his U.S. and Canadian colleagues work to get the word out about their annual celebration, Take Back Your Time Day, which occurs Oct. 24.
De Graaf, an independent filmmaker with a long, impressive list of social consciousness-raising documentaries under his belt -- including the popular PBS documentaries Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza -- explains that he started Take Back Your Time to "challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time-famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."
De Graaf says that the Obama camp responded with "definite interest," although he can't yet share specifics. De Graaf considers time-famine -- and the need for mandatory vacation time for all Americans -- a bipartisan issue, although he says he's aware that Republicans are more likely to object to national legislation.
Even some Democrats, he admits, think he is over-dramatizing the situation: Aren't there more pressing social justice issues for us to worry about? Poverty, healthcare and ethnic/gender disparities, to name a few?
"I've been told by a few prominent progressive activists that, while they're personally supportive of what we're trying to accomplish, they're not willing to get involved because this is really a white, middle-class issue," he says. " 'You couldn't be more wrong,' is what I tell them."
In July, Take Back Your Time released its findings from a scientific telephone sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults. The poll revealed that more than two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans would support the passage of a paid vacation law. Most enthusiastic about vacation-time-legislation were people under 35 (83 percent); African Americans (89 percent); Latinos (82 percent); people earning low incomes (82 percent); women (75 percent, versus 63 percent for men); and families with children (74 percent).
De Graaf says he was surprised but not shocked that such strong support came from low-income communities and communities of color. (One hundred percent of African-American respondents indicated that some vacation time was necessary to avoid burn out.)
"When you're poor, you're socially excluded," he says. "And/or when you're working two or three jobs to make ends meet, you know how important it is to have [downtime] with your loved ones."
But that kind of downtime is harder and harder to come by. According to the group's poll, 52 percent of working Americans received less than a week of paid vacation in the past year -- more than half of those received none -- while 65 percent of workers received less than two paid weeks off.
The result? Too much hard work -- whether unpaid or paid overtime -- really does hurt (and kill) people. Unlike the Japanese and Chinese, we haven't given death-by-overwork its own moniker (karoshi and guolaosi, respectively), much less enacted national legislation that allows surviving family members to sue over the workplace conditions that lead to such deaths (as Japan and Korea have).
In Japan, the image of a typical karoshi victim is that of a businessman who dies at his desk after too many 80-hour workweeks. But several international studies (in Finland, Israel, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) have shown that while both sexes are at high risk for "overwork" consequences -- heart disease, obesity, insomnia and persistent fatigue -- women are far more likely to suffer mental health consequences, especially when they do not take vacations.
A 2005 study funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also noted that roughly one in five women reported taking a vacation only once every six years. (A 2006 "Ask a Working Woman" AFL-CIO survey explains this, in part: Nearly four in 10 women earning less than $40,000 annually receive no paid vacation whatsoever.)
Things haven't always been this bad. Workers' lives have gone from bad to better to bad all over again. The Industrial Revolution brought extreme working conditions and 14-hour days. The late 1800s saw the beginning of an epic workers' battle for the eight-hour workday. As it turns out, Oct. 24 marks the 70th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage in the United States. Most Americans don't know that the original wording of the bill also guaranteed mandatory vacation time for all workers.
In light of that, de Graaf insists that it's high time to enact a national policy to ensure that we don't have to feel guilty (or fearful about losing our jobs) for taking time off.
"We need the right to have that time off," urges de Graaf. "Otherwise, we won't have the [energy for the] imagination we need to better ourselves and our communities."
This piece was originally written for In These Times, a national, monthly magazine based in Chicago.
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