Tom Tomorrow tells the story of the red states pill.

{ 9:56 AM }

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Run! Go see Billmon's indispensable compilation of administration quotes on WMD.

{ 6:51 PM }

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How to hide $44 trillion. Shove bad news under a rug at the White House, but first fire the messenger (MSNBC):

WASHINGTON, May 29 — The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the U.S. currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totaling at least $44 trillion in current U.S. dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the U.S. government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the “baby boom” generation’s future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill.

But the Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the U.S. is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 percent across-the-board income tax increase.

The study was being circulated as an independent working paper among Washington think-tanks as President George W. Bush on Wednesday signed into law a 10-year, $350 billion tax-cut package he welcomed as a victory for hard-working Americans and the economy.

The wealthiest 20% of Americans will receive 79.3% of this year's tax cut. Only "hard-working Americans," by the design of the Bush cabal, will finance the military ambitions of sons of millionaires whose dividend and inheritance income will remain untaxed and free to grow forever.

In a sane world, this — and not lying about a blow job — would be an impeachable offense.

{ 11:06 AM }

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Add your voice to stop the FCC. Free speech, particularly at the local level, is in grave danger. From the Washington Post:

Substantial grass-roots resistance to the Federal Communications Commission's plans to relax or eliminate several major media ownership rules has been building in recent weeks, turning a number-crunching bureaucratic process into a growing debate on free speech.

On June 2, the five-member commission is scheduled to vote on changes that would allow broadcast networks to buy more television stations and would lift the 28-year-old ban preventing newspapers from buying television stations in the same city.

Hundreds of thousands of e-mails and postcards are urging the FCC to put off a decision.

Those who favor relaxing and lifting the rules -- mainly, media corporations and the FCC's three Republican members -- say the regulations are no longer legally enforceable and have been made obsolete by the explosion of cable television channels and Web sites, which provide consumers with more sources of information than when the ownership rules were crafted years ago.

On the other side are the two Democratic commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, several public-interest groups and organizations that say what is at stake is nothing less than the health of the democracy. More consolidation, they say, will lead to fewer voices, making it difficult for minority viewpoints to be heard. Unexpected alliances have formed between liberal and conservative groups, opposing further deregulation.

In recent days, the FCC has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of e-mails and e-petitions. MoveOn.org, a public-interest organization founded by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, says it has collected 170,000 signatures on a petition to the FCC, urging the agency to keep the rules in place.

The current Bush administration agenda at the FCC, led by Colin Powell's son Michael, is so threatening to free speech that it is making strange bedfellows of those in opposition to it. How many other efforts unite Common Cause and the National Rifle Association against proposed policy?

Go to Move On's Stop the FCC page (also in the green box at the top of this column), where you can spend half a minute sending an email message to the FCC.

But do it now — before the vote next Monday.

{ 9:30 AM }

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S&L crook and presidential brother Neil Bush can now get an online divorce from Sharon Bush, the wife he jilted for a married employee of his mother's. An online split would be the fitting course of action for family man Neil, considering that he dumped her via email.

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I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that the threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, obstructs the orderly reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration and maintenance of peace and security in the country, and the development of political, administrative, and economic institutions in Iraq. This situation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

I hereby order:

Section 1. Unless licensed or otherwise authorized pursuant to this order, any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following:

(a) the Development Fund for Iraq, and
(b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons.

In other words, don't sue us for the oil — it's ours because we declared a national emergency.

Oil is the only Iraqi national resource mentioned in the order. Given the absence of WMD and the singular focus on Iraqi petroleum, could the administration's interest in the invasion be any clearer?

This executive order is dated May 22, 2003, and can be viewed here, courtesy of Cryptome.

{ 12:20 PM }

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From "A philosophical investigation into Enron" in The Guardian:

A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the $38 billion of debt run up by Enron would pay around a-fifth of the capital costs of providing safe drinking water to every human being on earth who currently lacks it. Universally available safe water would avoid some five million deaths a year and countless person-months of debilitating water-borne illness. It would have economic as well as humanitarian benefits, but those benefits would not show up as profit on any of the balance sheets that currently matter.

Enquire into almost any of the numbers that abound in the world of finance, and one discovers that it is the endpoint of an often complex chain of construction. Those chains often also lead deep into people's lives: into what happens to their savings and their pensions, into whether or not they have jobs or homes.

Bill Peterson's wife and children will tell you that. Mr Peterson worked for Enron, and was being treated for cancer when the corporation became bankrupt. He lost his job, and with it his Enron-subsidised health insurance. With expenses mounting, and his wife unable to take up paid work because she needed to look after him, the $800 a month the couple had to pay to keep their insurance going could be met only by selling the house in which they had brought up their children. Mr Peterson died last September, not at home but while staying with relatives 175 miles away from the rest of his family. "He should have been allowed to die in his own bed," his wife told the Financial Times.

What happened to Mr Peterson is one of the casual cruelties of the American system, cruelties that are the other side of its restless, innovative, money-making, winner-takes-all energy. His fate should also remind us that numbers matter. We need to understand how they are constructed, and perhaps to start to imagine ways in which they can be reconstructed to better ends.

The "casual cruelty" of the American system is of course what Bush conservatives mean when they say "compassion."

{ 9:20 AM }

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"Oklahoma's job cuts are part of a deep nationwide retrenchment eating away at the public sphere. According to some analysts, the states, which control most public services, are going through their worst crisis since the Depression. While the US is at the zenith of its global power, its health and education systems would be grounds for a scandal in poorer countries.

[...]

As a result of the cuts, 275,000 fewer Texan children will receive health care, and in Nebraska almost 25,000 low-income mothers have lost medical cover for their families because eligibility thresholds have been raised. Over this year and next, 1.7m Americans risk losing their health insurance."

— The Guardian via URLDJ.

{ 3:14 PM }

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Seeing the Forest notes it isn't the Republican party that created the mess we're in — it's the right wing philanthropists working in the background. And the only effective counterweight to the ideologues who generated the "message amplification infrastructure" is the cultivatation of left wing philanthropists who can seed the funding of advocacy for the progressive agenda.

It's a great post. Read it.

{ 2:51 PM }

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Art or Crap: the quiz.

My score was 14/16. Yay me. Via RuminateThis.

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