“It is 1969 in a high school history class in Palo Alto, California. The teacher, Ben Ross, is discussing the horrors of the holocaust. The students ask why it happened. If all the Germans weren’t Nazis, why did they just stand by and watch? The teacher goes home thinking about how to answer the question.
His answer is The wave.
The next day Ben Ross introduces his students to a new system based on discipline, community, and action. Students are to sit up straight with their hands on the desks. They must spring from their seats and give quick answers to the teacher’s questions. There’s a membership card and a special salute. What Ross never expected was that the students would love the new system. The discipline felt good. The new wave community was a kind of secret family, elite and special.
Like a kind of cancer, The wave moved beyond the classroom. Other students wanted to get involved and original members brought in new recruits with missionary zeal. At football games, if you weren’t a wave member you were forced to sit elsewhere. Anyone who said anything against the wave was considered an enemy. Anti-wave students were threatened or beaten up.
The experiment goes too far and the teacher is told to stop it. A school assembly of wave members is announced, coupled with promises of the appearance of the national leader of the wave. The lights dim and films of Hitler and the Holocaust appear. The film stops with the image of Hitler and his faithful followers still on the screen. Ross comes forward and asks the students to look at the soldiers surrounding Hitler. ‘Yes, you all would have made good Nazis. ...Fascism isn’t something those other people did, it is right here in all of us.’"
This reminds me of another post from elsewhere a couple months ago:
"Two old friends of mine -- a Jewish couple in their 80s, both retired university professors who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and eventually became U.S. citizens -- made a stunning remark to me a few months ago: 'You know, all our lives we have blamed our parents and our parents' generation for allowing Hitler to gain control. Now we're beginning to see how powerless they must have felt to stop what was happening all around them.'"
Convicted Watergate figure Chuck Colson returned to the White House Wednesday for a meeting with President Bush on Colson's post-prison endeavor - ministering to inmates.
"I felt quite emotional coming back here after my experiences in this building - and leaving it,'' Colson told reporters gathered on the White House driveway after his 40-minute meeting inside.
[...]
Colson was White House counsel for former President Nixon and spent seven months in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate scandal. In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries. Now an author and radio commentator, Colson was part of a group invited to the White House to talk with Bush about helping former inmates find work and keeping them from returning to prison.
Colson's Reston, Va.-based organization operates the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a rehabilitation program for inmates that is based on fundamentalist Christianity. The program was begun under then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1997 at a Texas prison and now is also offered at prisons in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota.
Colson praised Bush for allowing the program to start.
"At that time, I didn't believe he'd be willing to fight it through - the church-state issues and all that were involved in it,'' he said.
Participants live in a separate prison unit and follow a curriculum of religious study, other education and work for up to 18 months. After an inmate's release, the program continues for at least six months with guidance from a mentor and local church support.
An advocacy group, the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has filed suit against Iowa, contending state funding for the program is unconstitutional.
Bush asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to work on ways that such efforts could be expanded to the federal prison system, said Jim Towey, head of the White House faith-based office.
The plan, especially the appeal to Ashcroft, smells not only a bit too Christian, but too fundamentalist Christian. Even though we've studiously ignored the Saudi influence on 9-11-01, aren't we all a little sick of government-sponsored fundamentalists yet?
Besides, shouldn't Buddhist or Shinto or Jewish or Islamic prisoners be entitled to the same availability of religious study?
Colson's penal Christianity is all a ruse. He has much bigger ambitions beyond the superficial prison-prayer nonsense, and he's hoping President Gump will bite the bait.
What Colson really wants is $5 billion to preach abstinence to Africans, the amount he envisions as his portion of the vague $15 billion AIDS in Africa relief package Dubya proposed during the State of the Union address.
[C]onsider AK Steel Holding Corp., the country's third-largest publicly traded steel manufacturer. Until recently, the Middletown, Ohio, company's executive bonus plans contained a simple ground rule: If the company doesn't report net income, its executives don't receive bonuses that year.
For several years, the company's pension plans helped drive executive pay higher. Pension plans can boost earnings because, under accounting rules, companies must indirectly record as income some of the investment gains that pension-plan assets earn, a benefit that really took off during the torrid bull stock market of the late 1990s.
AK Steel benefited more than many: In 2000, for example, the company reported total pretax profit of $212 million -- 22% of which could be traced to its pension. By 2001, however, that changed. The company started recording pension expense, which rose to $625 million in 2002, contributing to a full-year loss of $502.4 million.
AK Steel executives didn't need to worry, however, because the terms for receiving bonuses quietly changed, too.
In describing the plan, the company effectively overrode the clause prohibiting payment of long-term bonuses if the company had no net income, inserting the words "except as otherwise approved by the Compensation Committee," according to a proxy filed with the SEC in April of 2002. The changes became official earlier this year.
In January 2003, two weeks before announcing the full-year loss for 2002, the company amended the terms of its annual bonus plan, so that bonuses would be pegged to net income "excluding special, unusual and extraordinary items." (The company similarly amended its long-term incentive plan.)
As a result, bonuses went unharmed by the new pension expense, which AK Steel classified as "unusual." Over the past two years, under the new rules, AK Steel has paid bonuses to its top five executives totaling $12.2 million, $7.7 million for me, a 77% loss for you.including $7.7 million to Chief Executive Richard M. Wardrop Jr., according to proxies filed with the SEC.
AK shareholders haven't been quite so fortunate: The company's shares are off 77% during the past two years, well behind its larger rivals U.S. Steel Corp. and Nucor Corp.
A spokesman for AK Steel declined to discuss the company's moves, including how much the bonuses would have been reduced if pension expense had been taken into account. Compensation consultants say it is nearly impossible to determine that from company filings.
So if you owned $1,000 worth of AK Steel stock in your 401(k) account over the last two years, it would now be worth $230 — while CEO Wardrop "quietly" took home $7.7 million in bonuses (in addition to his salary of $2 million).
Do these actions demonstrate business competence? I don't think so. But what do we do with a CEO who decimates his investors' confidence (not to mention their investments) and endangers the health of his company?
If you're Bush, you want to tap into that special Wardrop business magic, so you nominate him to a trade policy advisory committee.
AK Steel today [12/12/02] said that President George W. Bush intends to appoint Richard M. Wardrop Jr., Chairman, President and CEO of AK Steel, to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations (ACTPN) for a two-year term.
The purpose of the ACTPN is to provide the U.S. Trade Representative with overall policy advice on matters concerning objectives and bargaining positions on trade agreements, according to a statement released Tuesday by the White House. According to the statement, the ACTPN consists of representatives of non-federal governments and labor, industry, agriculture, small business, service industries, retailer and consumer interests. Mr. Wardrop is the only representative of a steelmaker among the appointees.
According to Bush, Richard M. Wardrop Jr. is qualifed to give "overall policy advice on matters concerning objectives and bargaining positions on trade agreements," having given himself $7.7 million in bonuses over the last two years while losing $41 million in the first quarter of 2003 alone.
This is Bush's America, the Peter Principle writ large: not so much an avoidance as a hatred of competence — a culture and a national economy of meritopathy, nominally led by the AWOL business-failure son of a one-term president.
The actual legislation that will be voted on in committee on JUNE 19TH is S.1046, and according to Common Cause...
...it would overturn some of the most egregious parts of the FCC rule change. This bipartisan bill would keep a single company from owning broadcast outlets that reach more than 35% of American households (as opposed to 45% post-rule-change). A crucial amendment sponsored by Senators Dorgan and Snowe would keep newspapers and TV stations from merging.
CauseNet at Common Cause is providing two easy ways for you to get your support for the bill and your opposition to the Honorable Commissioner Abernathy and her honorable cohorts registered where it'll count:
If you live in any of the states represented on the committee — Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, or West Virginia — Click Here, and then follow the instructions.
For everyone else: Click Here to find out what to do.
In addition, here is the link for the Communications subcommitte of the Commerce Committee. It has a web based email form as well as links to all the members.
Democrats concerned about facing a popular wartime president in next year's elections think there may be an opening in the most unusual of places: President Bush's treatment of the military.
Bush is held in high esteem by the military, because of his leadership of successful military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and his unstinting defense budgets. But Bush's opponents say he has rewarded American troops' heroism by skimping on their housing benefits, their tax cuts, their health care and education for their children.
A new report by the Democratic staff on the House Appropriations Committee this week asserts that Bush, by cutting about $200 million in the program that provides assistance to public schools serving military bases, would pare education funding disproportionately for children of soldiers who fought in Iraq. That adds to several complaints the staff has assembled: Bush's signature on the latest tax cut, which failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 low-income military personnel; a $1.5 billion reduction in his 2004 budget, to $9.2 billion from $10.7 billion, for military housing and the like; and a cut of $14.6 billion over 10 years in benefits paid through the Veterans Administration.
"They're saying they unequivocally support the military, but then they make quite clear that the check is not in the mail," said Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), the top Democrat on House Appropriations, referring to the administration. "They're taking actions that fly in the face of the support they profess for the military."
The story goes on to quote candidate Kerry, an actual veteran, as saying, "The real test of patriotism is how you treat veterans and keep promises to people who wore the uniform."
Well, duh. But promise-keeping is not on W's agenda, it's only on Cheney's, and exclusively to multinational corporations.
Meanwhile, AWOLBush.com features this informative poster with a capsule description of W's missing year of military duty.
Sunshine State. Runny mixture of satire and drama, like an underdone Altman omelet. Many talented actors in a wide variety of thin, thankless roles. Skimble says: 4 out of 10.
Last Tango in Paris. Thematically timeless and stylistically dated. Obscene only in its intrusive use of garish music by Gato Barbieri. 8 out of 10.
8-1/2 Women. Formal experimenter Peter Greenaway at his least compelling. Ideas outnumber characters or scenes, and most of the actors provide incredibly weak performances. 5 out of 10.
13 Conversations about One Thing. One would have been too many. This thing reeks less of real life than of film school. Ebert liked it. 4 out of 10.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Mac McClelland did some quick math as he steered his Lincoln Navigator through chaotic Dubai traffic.
He'd just learned of a contract to supply food to 12,500 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. If he won it, he'd be a subcontractor to a subcontractor on a deal that originally went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, which provides support services to the military overseas.
"Twelve thousand five hundred mouths," he mused. "That's about 40,000 meals a day." He figured if he could clear 10 cents profit on each meal, he could make as much as $4,000 a day. "That's real money," he said to himself.
[...]
Mr. McClelland, a retired Marine Corps major, figures he's got three dozen deals cooking right now related to Iraq reconstruction. In the past month, he's rounded up local companies to bid on a contract to supply automobiles to the new Iraqi police force. He's signed on as a consultant to help 3M Co. and a company that makes X-ray-scanning equipment break into the Iraq market. And he's set up a deal with a scrap-metal company based in Houston that wants to bid for the remains of Iraqi tanks blown up by U.S. bombs. On the side, the 47-year-old Mr. McClelland is trying to persuade some key members of the royal family here to let him organize a Dubai jazz festival -- the U.A.E.'s first.
Mr. McClelland describes himself as a "bit player" in the Iraq gold rush. But even for the bit players, there's the potential for big money. "If 10% of the projects come through, I'll have made enough to retire twice over," he says. A couple of big ones, such as the food contract, could make his year.
Middlemen and go-betweens with strong military contacts always appear wherever there's a war and wherever there's money to be made supplying the U.S. armed forces. What makes Iraq different is the size of the rebuilding effort the U.S. has taken on and the huge number of U.S. troops involved. The U.S. government is spending several billion dollars a month on troop support, fuel, equipment and, to a lesser extent, reconstruction.
Rather than bid out each individual project, the U.S. government has awarded large contracts to a handful of corporations, including Bechtel Group Inc. -- which won a $680 million deal to coordinate the rebuilding effort -- and Halliburton Corp.'s Kellogg, Brown & Root, which has taken in about $425 million of U.S. Army work, much of it related to supporting troops with food and housing in Iraq and the Gulf. Those big players then offer hundreds of subcontracts to other companies. Bechtel, for instance, is subcontracting about 90% of its work.
[...]
Mr. McClelland supplied the company [3M] with the names of 15 senior military contracting officers in Kuwait, the U.A.E., Oman and Qatar. Mr. McClelland also gave 3M a list of names of local executives from companies such as Bechtel; Kellogg, Brown & Root and military-supply firm DynCorp, many of whom are former officers Mr. McClelland served with in the Gulf. Soon after Dr. Hoeller arrived in Kuwait for the Bechtel conference, he met a senior military officer, one of Mr. McClelland's contacts, who complained about a lack of Post-It notes in Iraq. Within days, the military had put in an order for Post-Its, electrical tape and multimedia projectors.
It's reassuring to know that American taxpayers are doing their part to address the devastating Post-It note and multimedia projector shortages in Iraq. Chalk it up to our philosophy of global humanitarianism.
The title of the above article by Greg Jaffe is "Rebuilding Iraq Proves to Be A Gold Mine for Middlemen," which only goes to show that there's more than one way for crony capitalists to loot a country without WMDs.
UPDATE: In a freak blogging coincidence, Nathan Newman cites the same article as above, but rightly calls attention to the connection between Mac McClelland and Enron.
