David Seaton's News Links - Premium Edition

" When ignored, all realities plot their revenge."

José Ortega y Gasset

International Press Review – Friday 17th of June – 2005

News Links Commentary - Drifting in a labyrinth

Europe may wander in circles, lost in its soliloquy, but Bush is beginning to look every bit as much “yesterday’s man” as Blair, Chirac and Schroeder do. Polls taken by the Associated Press have Bush’s overall approval rating at 43 percent. 59 percent think the country is going in the wrong direction and 56 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iraq. The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, told the Washington Post that he sees a lot of parallels between the restiveness of European voters and their American counterparts "People feel there is something wrong. Both parties are hurt, but the governing party is at greater risk." Most significantly, with congressional elections coming in 2006, the Republican controlled congress only obtains the approval of 31 percent of those polled.

According to the Knight-Ridder Newspapers, “A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military solution to the insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.” A recent Gallup poll shows that 6 out of 10 Americans think the US should withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Six weeks ago The Sunday Times, owned by media-magnate and supposedly enthusiastic Bush supporter, Rupert Murdoch published the leaked minutes of a July 2002 Downing Street meeting which show that Bush and Blair began their war, not in March 2003, as most believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Bush received his congressional backing, and more than two months before the UN vote. Silenced in the beginning by the US press, now, thanks mostly to massive Internet coverage, there is in the Time’s words, “a wave of public awareness sweeping America which is very dangerous for Bush.”

Isn’t it odd that Rupert Murdoch’s Times, is playing “deep throat” to Bush’s Nixon? How does this fit with Murdoch’s ownership of the ‘intellectual author’ of the Iraq war, the neo-con flagship, “Weekly Standard" or of Fox News TV whose viewers still believe that Saddam Hussein organized 11-S. I cannot believe that such confidential information as the Memo, which could do Bush so much damage, can be repeatedly published in The Times without Murdoch's approval. Strange as it seems, Murdoch appears to be using his English newspaper to defenestrate Bush in the USA. David Seaton

Contents

· A good crisis for the EU - William Pfaff - The International Herald Tribune

· A new political vision based on the euro - Wolfgang Munchau - Financial Times

· The world's hospital - Timothy Garton Ash - The Guardian

· Losing Our Country - Paul Krugman - New York Times

· Iraq Exit strategy: Civil war - Asia Times

· The frontier continent - The Guardian

· Oil discovery adds new twist to Darfur tragedy - Reuters

· Black Market Organs - Lip Magazine

· Home Prices Rise Across the Global Village - The Wall Street Journal

· Microsoft China portal bars talk of 'freedom' - The International Herald Tribune

This Weeks Articles

The United States wants a Europe that serves as a support for American hegemony: a super stable home of "coalitions of the willing"; a huge, amorphous, free trade zone, perhaps even including parts of the Middle East. Paradoxically, in the medium to long run, the big loser of the European referenda was the USA. DS

Abstract: While it will be months before the results are fully known, the train wreck of the European constitutional treaty may have been a very good thing for the European Union. It has saved it from an open-ended commitment to expansion that could have been fatal to the EU's own political coherence and to any European expectation of playing a vigorous and independent future role in international relations.(...) De Hoop Scheffer told interviewers in Berlin that "the Bush administration wants to see Europe as a strong partner. It is clear there is no interest in the U.S. in seeing a Europe that is weakened, less efficient and less effective." This, though, is true only so long as the European partners put their forces and resources to work under U.S. leadership, as in NATO's Afghan security operation and its Iraq officers' training program. The old NATO that acted in unison on the basis of equality, with political decisions by consensus has, for practical purposes, ceased to exist since Donald Rumsfeld announced that the new Washington rule is coalitions for specific missions.(...) common sense says that the United States is not going to get what it wants, a submissive European Union. The Europeans are divided on the issue, of course, but perhaps less than Washington thinks. The "force" - so to speak - is with the people who want an autonomous Europe, a counterweight to the United States. This is because they are acting from the primordial impulse of a society to affirm identity and independence. Otherwise known as nationalism, this impulse is the one that in France and the Netherlands defeated an expansion that would put an end to the European possibility to act independently.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/13/opinion/edpfaff.php

A good crisis for the EU - The International Herald Tribune

William Pfaff

JUNE 14, 2005

While it will be months before the results are fully known, the train wreck of the European constitutional treaty may have been a very good thing for the European Union.

It has saved it from an open-ended commitment to expansion that could have been fatal to the EU's own political coherence and to any European expectation of playing a vigorous and independent future role in international relations.

The EU, expanded eventually to an association of as many as 35 nations (some of them Muslim), as some have proposed, could not possibly have had a foreign policy that went much beyond a collective flinch in reaction to manifest threat. Even with 25 members, the inhibitions to action are serious.

Therefore, American benediction of a strong and united Europe, as indicated in Washington in recent days, and as conveyed to NATO's EU members by Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer following his recent U.S. trip, is a safer endorsement than it would have seemed before the French and Dutch voted against the constitution.

It comes with a qualification, reasonably enough, from Washington's point of view. De Hoop Scheffer told interviewers in Berlin that "the Bush administration wants to see Europe as a strong partner. It is clear there is no interest in the U.S. in seeing a Europe that is weakened, less efficient and less effective."

This, though, is true only so long as the European partners put their forces and resources to work under U.S. leadership, as in NATO's Afghan security operation and its Iraq officers' training program. The old NATO that acted in unison on the basis of equality, with political decisions by consensus has, for practical purposes, ceased to exist since Donald Rumsfeld announced that the new Washington rule is coalitions for specific missions.

The French and Dutch votes against EU expansion, and Tony Blair's suspension of British preparations for a referendum (which undoubtedly would have produced a "no" vote), leave little hope for the constitutional treaty. The constitution must be approved unanimously to be adopted, and even for the European Council to consider revision of the text and its resubmission to recalcitrant members, 20 of 25 member countries have to have ratified the treaty.

At the moment, two have rejected it; a third, Luxembourg, may say no even if it still holds its referendum; Denmark's referendum is likely to be canceled, and the British referendum never held. In Sweden, until recently counted a safe "yes," 65 percent of the public wanted a referendum even before the French and Dutch votes - scarcely a good sign. It takes considerable optimism to think that this duck is not dead.

If it is dead, then the United States will not have a Europe that admits Turkey, Ukraine and Georgia, or that remains open to still other new members in the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Asian states.

Instead, the United States, even more than now, may face a divided Europe, functioning on the legal base of the Nice Treaty. This strengthens Poland in European decision making, but also Spain.

Tony Blair will be in a strong position during the second half of 2005, when he will hold the presidency of the EU, but his own position in Britain remains vulnerable. His influence in Europe will depend in part on the outcome of the German elections this fall, and on what happens next in France - and indeed in Iraq, where matters currently are going badly.

The division within Europe of most interest to Washington concerns EU military and security ambitions. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. under secretary of state and a former ambassador to NATO, bluntly told a NATO conference in Sweden on May 25: "Let's get it straight. NATO does the big military operations" - or to be more accurate, U.S.-led coalitions drawn from NATO and elsewhere are expected to do them.

The EU handles peacekeeping operations. "If not," he said, "there will be friction, and you [meaning the Europeans] are not going to be happy."

The chastened European Union that emerges from the expansion crisis is expected to be one in which the main European foreign- and security-policy activists, France and Germany, will be weakened. Gerhard Schröder could be out of office in the autumn. Jacques Chirac is now politically beleaguered, even if his prime minister is the Frenchman the Bush administration most loves to hate, Dominique de Villepin.

But despite the threat from Burns, common sense says that the United States is not going to get what it wants, a submissive European Union. The Europeans are divided on the issue, of course, but perhaps less than Washington thinks.

The "force" - so to speak - is with the people who want an autonomous Europe, a counterweight to the United States. This is because they are acting from the primordial impulse of a society to affirm identity and independence.

Otherwise known as nationalism, this impulse is the one that in France and the Netherlands defeated an expansion that would put an end to the European possibility to act independently.

One would imagine that ultimately the force will prevail.

Here is Plan B. No time to lose. DS

Abstract: As French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin already had a Plan B for European integration two years ago. Last week he repeated his call for a Franco-German union in his address to the French National Assembly, this time as prime minister. It is no accident that the idea of a core Europe is coming up now. When European Union leaders meet at their summit in Brussels this week, they will be staring at the political void the French and Dutch electorates have left them: no more enlargement, no more integration, no more liberalisation. All that is left is the prospect of a row over the British rebate from the EU budget. This is depressing for a pro-European, unless you shift the parameters. By rejecting the constitution, the French and Dutch electorates ended political integration at the level of all 25 EU members for the time being. The only way for integration to continue now is to move down a level, towards a hard core.(...) The French and Germans are afraid of the same things - Anglo-Saxon capitalism, globalisation - but they lack a common positive agenda.(...) (there is) only one sensible option, a core Europe based on the 12-nation eurozone. The eurozone has the advantage of functioning institutions - the European Central Bank or the euro group of finance ministers. In Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, it has a president. The eurozone also has a simple and clear common political interest, to succeed economically under the euro. It is also by far the least discriminatory hard core imaginable. It is open to every member of the EU. Most important, it badly needs a political dimension(...) Here is a shortlist of things for a politically integrated monetary union to do: at the macro level, create a centralised unemployment insurance fund to shift resources from booming to depressed areas of the eurozone economy as a part of a stabilisation policy; co-ordinate fiscal policy beyond the stability pact, the procedures to enforce fiscal discipline; create a common tax base and, perhaps in the long run, create tax union. At the micro level, create a eurozone agenda for economic reform with clear priorities for each country; improve the conditions for cross-border labour mobility by introducing portable pensions and health insurance, and by introducing eurozone-wide systems for credit checks, proof of identity and property rental rules. If you have ever tried to open a bank account in Athens, rent an apartment in Paris, or obtain a telephone line in Rome, you know what I mean. EU voters have been saying: do not move to the next stage of political integration until and unless you fix the projects you have already created. None needs more fixing than the eurozone. If Europe is looking for a political vision for the next decade, it need look no further.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8065c5f4-dba8-11d9-913a-00000e2511c8.html

A new political vision based on the euro - Financial Times

By Wolfgang Munchau

June 13 2005

"If the Europe of 25 fails, what option remains for France? The idea of a Franco-German approach." (Dominique de Villepin, November 2003)

As French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin already had a Plan B for European integration two years ago. Last week he repeated his call for a Franco-German union in his address to the French National Assembly, this time as prime minister.

It is no accident that the idea of a core Europe is coming up now. When European Union leaders meet at their summit in Brussels this week, they will be staring at the political void the French and Dutch electorates have left them: no more enlargement, no more integration, no more liberalisation. All that is left is the prospect of a row over the British rebate from the EU budget.

This is depressing for a pro-European, unless you shift the parameters. By rejecting the constitution, the French and Dutch electorates ended political integration at the level of all 25 EU members for the time being. The only way for integration to continue now is to move down a level, towards a hard core.

This raises two immediate questions: which countries should take part in a core? And what should such a core do? The concept did not take off in the past because its proponents tended to have multiple answers to the first question, and none to the second.

I can think of four broad scenarios for a core Europe, of which only one can answer both questions satisfactorily. Mr de Villepin's scenario for a Franco-German union cannot really answer the second question. The French and Germans are afraid of the same things - Anglo-Saxon capitalism, globalisation - but they lack a common positive agenda.

The second option consists of multiple overlapping cores for each policy area. The legal basis would be "enhanced co-operation", a procedure first set up in the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 and later extended. There are two problems. The procedure has not been used before and, coming soon after the No votes, it would seem a tactic to implement the constitution through the back door.

The third option is a geographical core, based on the six founding members of the EU. This is the least sensible option of all, since it would be even more backward-looking than a Franco-German union.

This leaves only one sensible option, a core Europe based on the 12-nation eurozone. The eurozone has the advantage of functioning institutions - the European Central Bank or the euro group of finance ministers. In Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, it has a president.

The eurozone also has a simple and clear common political interest, to succeed economically under the euro. It is also by far the least discriminatory hard core imaginable. It is open to every member of the EU.

Most important, it badly needs a political dimension, as the recent debate about the future of the euro has shown. The euro has not brought the promised benefits. Economic growth is low, unemployment high. Countries are not observing fiscal targets. Monetary policy is unresponsive. Labour and product markets are not sufficiently flexible.

Here is a shortlist of things for a politically integrated monetary union to do: at the macro level, create a centralised unemployment insurance fund to shift resources from booming to depressed areas of the eurozone economy as a part of a stabilisation policy; co-ordinate fiscal policy beyond the stability pact, the procedures to enforce fiscal discipline; create a common tax base and, perhaps in the long run, create tax union.

At the micro level, create a eurozone agenda for economic reform with clear priorities for each country; improve the conditions for cross-border labour mobility by introducing portable pensions and health insurance, and by introducing eurozone-wide systems for credit checks, proof of identity and property rental rules. If you have ever tried to open a bank account in Athens, rent an apartment in Paris, or obtain a telephone line in Rome, you know what I mean.

EU voters have been saying: do not move to the next stage of political integration until and unless you fix the projects you have already created. None needs more fixing than the eurozone. If Europe is looking for a political vision for the next decade, it need look no further.

More beautiful than any cathedral, any Shakespeare play, any Bach cantata or the Pietá of Michaelangelo, is the European public health system and the human values it embodies. This, if nothing else, must be saved from the "creative destruction" of the "Flat World". DS

Abstract: While the carers are mainly young and foreign, the patients on this ward are mostly elderly, white and British. They have old-fashioned English names like Reg, Jack and Fred. Since the hospital beds are divided only by all-round curtains, you can hear everyone else's conversations, while they assume they are talking privately - the perfect set-up for a writer. What I heard, and saw a little when the curtains were drawn back, was a moving culture of caring. Old-fashioned terms of endearment rained down upon us: "Here are your pills, my love", "Come on, sweetheart". Also: love, luvvie, darling, honey, my tuppence. Spoken in all the accents of the world to Fred, a white-haired old man who could neither feed nor lift himself. On Fred, well into Shakespeare's seventh age - sans teeth, sans everything - the greatest care was lavished. Even bossy Milada found a gentle word for Fred. "Ok, luvvie," said an English nurse, "this evening it will be Mark, Chapter Two." As night fell, St Mark's Gospel sounded through the curtains, read from what Marilyn Monroe once called "that book by Mr Gideon" - and very loudly, because Fred was also deaf. It was wonderful to see how they all worked, in their different ways, to give this poor old man the greatest gift: dignity. So far as I could judge, the medical treatment was first class. The food was remarkably good, including the Leading Chef dishes, designed with the help of seven top UK chefs. Nurses told me that pay is slowly getting better. Only the cleaning seemed to me still very patchy, lagging somewhat behind the sanitary conditions I recently found in a modest hotel in Bucharest. But the great thing was this culture of caring.(...) At one point, in my slightly fevered state, I found myself thinking that it made me proud to be British - a phrase of such Daily Mail-type blimpdom that I would never use it while in usual health. But yes, what I saw in this NHS ward made me proud to be British, in a way that no military victory, no sporting triumph, no government, monarch or pageant ever did. Proud to be a citizen of a nation that thinks it worth spending so much of the money we earn to give even the poorest, oldest man or woman a basic dignity. Proud of those showers of endearments, which low-paid staff from Trinidad, the Philippines, Zimbabwe and Kurdistan somehow find it easy to adopt, as a British version of something universal.(...) With its ageing native-born population, Europe's future is Fred: an old white man propped-up by immigrant workers and spoon-fed by foreign carers. One big test for Europe is whether we can display the basic norms of our society in a way that makes it possible for migrants - whether they are secular, Christian, Muslim or Chinese - to accept and adopt, because they connect also to their own. That is something which, on my admittedly brief observation, the British National Health Service succeeds in doing, with its culture of caring. More broadly, the NHS represents a historic choice, born of the confrontation between modern industrial capitalism, on the one hand, and labour, socialist and communist movements on the other. It's the British version of a choice for a more humane, democratic version of capitalism that most European countries have made, in their different ways. Emerging from hospital, I feel now more than ever that this is the right choice. So the real question our so-called leaders should be addressing in Brussels today is this: in a world being completely remade by the fall of barriers to trade and the economic rise of Asia, how the hell can we still afford to pay for it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5216749-103677,00.html

The world's hospital - The Guardian

A few days in an NHS ward show you what we in Europe are struggling to defend

Timothy Garton Ash

June 16, 2005

'It is good to have many brothers," Tamir, from Iraqi Kurdistan, gravely advises me. "Then if someone does a bad thing to you, your brother does a bad thing to him." You mean, for example, kill him? "Yes!" Tamir laughs.

Tamir (I have changed his name, and most others in this article) is a cleaner in the hospital ward where I have involuntarily spent the past few days. He is just one from the legion of different nationalities who have marched past my sickbed - Ugandan, Czech, Zimbabwean, Trinidadian, Kurdish, Filipino, German, occasionally even English - in the various liveries of Britain's largest army, the National Health Service. Making my bed are Xhara from Uganda and Joseph, who, she now discovers, is from Zimbabwe. The following dialogue ensues across the bedclothes:

Xhara: "Did you go to the demonstration against Mugabe driving people out of their houses?"

Joseph (looking uncomfortable): "No. And you know they were sort of huts not houses. And from a certain point of view you could say those people were a kind of social disease."

Xhara: "OK, but they should have built them new houses first."

Joseph: "Ah, it's all a game of politics."

Xhara: "Yes, we know politics is a game, but I think you are a Mugabe man! [loud laugh]"

Joseph mutters an embarrassed half-denial. However, when he comes back to take my blood pressure, he insists that Mugabe has done much for education (Joseph was a teacher back home), healthcare and the country's independence. "And if he is a dictator, then he is still better than Idi Amin!" This would seem to qualify for a world record in faint praise. But yes, the economy is so rotten, he and his wife have both come to work in the NHS.

Joseph particularly approves of the seizure of white farmers' land in Zimbabwe. Next thing, a nurse with an attractive honey complexion calls at my bedside. I can't quite place her accent. Where's she from? "Zimbabwe ... you know, Rhodesia." Yes, her parents were landowners, and yes, they were expropriated. So she, too, came to work in the NHS. This British hospital begins to feel like the Statue of Liberty: bring me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free.

My least favourite nurse is Milada, a big, bossy woman from the Czech Republic. Even murmuring a few words in her native Czech barely softens her. Only once do I hear her really laugh. This is when I ask her opinion of the new Czech president, the Thatcherite economist Vaclav Klaus. "Klaus," she says, "is an idiot. A real idiot!" You must imagine this said very loudly, in a Czech accent, with a short "o" and the sound of two "ts" at the end. Then a great Slavonic guffaw wakes the old man in the next bed. Twenty years ago, she would have had great difficulty coming to work here and, like Joseph, might have hesitated to criticise her president, even abroad. But now: "Klaus is an idiot!"

While the carers are mainly young and foreign, the patients on this ward are mostly elderly, white and British. They have old-fashioned English names like Reg, Jack and Fred. Since the hospital beds are divided only by all-round curtains, you can hear everyone else's conversations, while they assume they are talking privately - the perfect set-up for a writer.

What I heard, and saw a little when the curtains were drawn back, was a moving culture of caring. Old-fashioned terms of endearment rained down upon us: "Here are your pills, my love", "Come on, sweetheart". Also: love, luvvie, darling, honey, my tuppence. Spoken in all the accents of the world to Fred, a white-haired old man who could neither feed nor lift himself. On Fred, well into Shakespeare's seventh age - sans teeth, sans everything - the greatest care was lavished. Even bossy Milada found a gentle word for Fred. "Ok, luvvie," said an English nurse, "this evening it will be Mark, Chapter Two." As night fell, St Mark's Gospel sounded through the curtains, read from what Marilyn Monroe once called "that book by Mr Gideon" - and very loudly, because Fred was also deaf. It was wonderful to see how they all worked, in their different ways, to give this poor old man the greatest gift: dignity.

So far as I could judge, the medical treatment was first class. The food was remarkably good, including the Leading Chef dishes, designed with the help of seven top UK chefs. Nurses told me that pay is slowly getting better. Only the cleaning seemed to me still very patchy, lagging somewhat behind the sanitary conditions I recently found in a modest hotel in Bucharest. But the great thing was this culture of caring.

At one point, in my slightly fevered state, I found myself thinking that it made me proud to be British - a phrase of such Daily Mail-type blimpdom that I would never use it while in usual health. But yes, what I saw in this NHS ward made me proud to be British, in a way that no military victory, no sporting triumph, no government, monarch or pageant ever did. Proud to be a citizen of a nation that thinks it worth spending so much of the money we earn to give even the poorest, oldest man or woman a basic dignity. Proud of those showers of endearments, which low-paid staff from Trinidad, the Philippines, Zimbabwe and Kurdistan somehow find it easy to adopt, as a British version of something universal.

Suddenly, I found myself thinking: "Oh heck, people will want me to comment on the EU summit." Well, you know what, the last thing in the world I want to write about is that bunch of weary, short-sighted, retread opportunists, laughably called "European leaders", who are tearing apart a magnificent project before our very eyes. Sod them (I thought, still in my slightly fevered state). I want to write about this hospital ward - a far more uplifting spectacle. And then I realised that in writing about this NHS ward, I would be writing about Europe after all.

With its ageing native-born population, Europe's future is Fred: an old white man propped-up by immigrant workers and spoon-fed by foreign carers. One big test for Europe is whether we can display the basic norms of our society in a way that makes it possible for migrants - whether they are secular, Christian, Muslim or Chinese - to accept and adopt, because they connect also to their own. That is something which, on my admittedly brief observation, the British National Health Service succeeds in doing, with its culture of caring.

More broadly, the NHS represents a historic choice, born of the confrontation between modern industrial capitalism, on the one hand, and labour, socialist and communist movements on the other. It's the British version of a choice for a more humane, democratic version of capitalism that most European countries have made, in their different ways. Emerging from hospital, I feel now more than ever that this is the right choice. So the real question our so-called leaders should be addressing in Brussels today is this: in a world being completely remade by the fall of barriers to trade and the economic rise of Asia, how the hell can we still afford to pay for it? We need a better answer than Tamir's.

The "normal" thing, if left unregulated, is a small group of very rich and a huge mass of very poor. The modern, mass, middle class society is an artificial construction... Like hot running water or garbage collection. It makes life more civilized and "livable" for everyone and ensures tension free, democratic "normalcy." Weaken or destroy this artificial middle class and you create a "Bolivia" in what was once a stable, reasonably happy society. You don't believe me? Read Paul Krugman. DS

Abstract: Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.(...) The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists. Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.(...) let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power. Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.(...) the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html

Losing Our Country - New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

June 10, 2005

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what's going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try to do something about the politics of greed.

"A few months ago the Bush administration had reason to hope that a spring of freedom might be beginning in the Middle East. What's occurring, however, looks more like a stagnant summer." - Washington Post Editorial.

Abstract: As Shi'ites and Kurds fought for three months to come up with an Iraqi cabinet, it is emerging from Baghdad that soon a broad front will emerge on the political scene composed of politicians, religious leaders, clan and tribal sheikhs - basically Sunni but with Shi'ite participation - with a single-minded agenda: the end of the US-led occupation. This front will include, among others, what we have termed the Sinn Fein component of the resistance, the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Sadrists. It will refuse any kind of dialogue with new Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and his government unless there's a definite timetable for the complete withdrawal of the occupation forces. Even the top Marine in Iraq, Major General Stephen Johnson, has admitted, "There will be no progress as long as the insurgents are not implicated in a political process."(...) Against all odds, a national liberation front is emerging in Iraq. Washington hawks may see it coming, but they certainly don't want it. Many groups in this front have already met in Algiers. The front is opposed to the American occupation and permanent Pentagon military bases; opposed to the privatization and corporate looting of the Iraqi economy; and opposed to the federation of Iraq, ie balkanization. Members of the front clearly see through the plan of fueling sectarianism to provoke an atmosphere of civil war, thus legitimizing the American presence. The George W Bush administration's obsession in selling the notion that Iraqis - or "anti-Iraqi forces", or "foreign militants" - are trying to start a civil war in the eastern flank of the Arab nation is as ludicrous as the myth it sells of the resistance as just a lunatic bunch of former Ba'athists and Wahhabis.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF10Ak03.html

Iraq Exit strategy: Civil war - Asia Times

By Pepe Escobar

"In reality, the electoral process was designed to legitimize the occupation, rather than ridding the country of the occupation ... Anyone who sees himself capable of bringing about political reform should go ahead and try, but my belief is that the occupiers won't allow him." - Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr

As Shi'ites and Kurds fought for three months to come up with an Iraqi cabinet, it is emerging from Baghdad that soon a broad front will emerge on the political scene composed of politicians, religious leaders, clan and tribal sheikhs - basically Sunni but with Shi'ite participation - with a single-minded agenda: the end of the US-led occupation.

This front will include, among others, what we have termed the Sinn Fein component of the resistance, the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Sadrists. It will refuse any kind of dialogue with new Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and his government unless there's a definite timetable for the complete withdrawal of the occupation forces. Even the top Marine in Iraq, Major General Stephen Johnson, has admitted, "There will be no progress as long as the insurgents are not implicated in a political process."

But the proliferation of what many moderate Sunnis and Shi'ites suspect as being Pentagon-organized black ops is putting the emergence of this front in jeopardy. This is obvious when we see Harith al-Dhari - the AMS leader - blaming the Badr Brigades (the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution - SCIRI - in Iraq, a major partner in the government) for the killing of Sunni Arab clerics.

Breaking up Iraq

Several Iranian websites have widely reported a plan to break up Iraq into three Shi'ite southern mini-states, two Kurdish mini-states and one Sunni mini-state - with Baghdad as the seat of a federal government. Each mini-state would be in charge of law and order and the economy within its own borders, with Baghdad in charge of foreign policy and military coordination. The plan was allegedly conceived by David Philip, a former White House adviser working for the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC). The AFPC is financed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has also funded both the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century and American Enterprise Institute.

The plan would be "sold" under the admission that the recently elected, Shi'ite-dominated Jaafari government is incapable of controlling Iraq and bringing the Sunni Arab guerrillas to the negotiating table. More significantly, the plan is an exact replica of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq - an essential part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East. Curiously, Henry Kissinger was selling the same idea even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Once again this is classic divide and rule: the objective is the perpetuation of Arab disunity. Call it Iraqification; what it actually means is sectarian fever translated into civil war. Operation Lightning - the highly publicized counter-insurgency tour de force with its 40,000 mostly Shi'ite troops rounding up Sunni Arabs - can be read as the first salvo of the civil war. Vice President Dick Cheney all but admitted the whole plan on CNN, confidently predicting that "the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office".

But the destiny awaiting this counter-insurgency may be best evaluated by comparing it to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 classic, The Battle of Algiers - one of the most influential political films ever, and supposedly a "must see" at the Pentagon. The French in Algeria in the early 1960s did indeed break the back of the guerrillas - but in the end lost the Algerian war. Talking about Vietnamization - the precursor to Iraqification - the Vietcong's Tet offensive in 1968 was lethal, but the counter-insurgency - Operation Phoenix - was even more lethal. In the end, though, the US also lost the war.

There's no Operation Phoenix going on in Iraq. The US has little "humint" (human intelligence), so it is incapable of penetrating the complex resistance tribal net - and not only because of its