by Ira Chernus

There is an eerie quiet across the land.  The chance of a second major terrorist attack is somewhere between “very likely” and “100% guaranteed,” according to the people we pay with our tax dollars to know such things.  I feel like I am on a huge bus heading straight towarda cliff.  We could suggest that the driver steer in a different direction.  But no one wants to talk about it.

Perhaps this is a school bus, where the kids sit quietly because they don’t want to make the driver mad.  Back in early October, newsleaked out that intelligence officials told Congress another attack was100% certain, if we attacked Afghanistan.  The driver -- the president -- got very mad, indeed.  He threatened to limit Congressional briefings drastically (and then backed off).  But Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer had already warned:  “People have to watch what they say.”   The news media got the message.  Some things are better left unmentioned - even impending disaster.

( Read More... | 3733 bytes in body )

As the Afghan War Reaches a Climax, Questions About the Slaughter of Prisoners Cannot Be Brushed Aside
by Jonathan Freedland

The caravan of war wants to move on, but Afghanistan is not quite ready to let go. The planners and politicians in Washington are itching to look beyond Kabul, towards Baghdad or elsewhere, but Afghanistan has not finished with them just yet. The country is still losing and shedding blood, still making winners and losers of the foreign powers who want to influence it and still raising some dark and troubling questions - including some that reach uncomfortably close to home.

Start with the obvious: the fighting is not over. For all the temptation to "pocket" the Afghan triumph and move on to Phase Two against Iraq, this victory is not complete. The Taliban remain in control of their heartland in Kandahar. A thousand US marines have just arrived nearby, charged with finishing the Taliban off - and meeting America's prime objective, the elimination of Osama bin Laden.

( Read More... | 6343 bytes in body )

by Danny Schechter

It is rare when a non-media columnist for The New York Times devotes precious ink to taking on the media. When economist Paul Krugman did just that recently, I was startled because it is so uncommon for issue-oriented commentators even to acknowledge that most people understand the world through what they see and read, or that the media might be missing key news. How stories are played, or ignored, is usually not a subject that opinion-makers think about even though it is their stock in trade.

Now we have a pundit admitting in print, first, that "most Americans get their news from TV," and then adding that the images on TV don't show the whole picture. "If you pay attention to the whole picture, you start to feel that you are living in a different reality than the one on TV," he writes. By focusing on political ideology, says Krugman, reporters are missing the economic stories that are hidden in plain sight.

( Read More... | 6296 bytes in body )

by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot

In the folklore of the business press, a widely held explanation has already congealed for the upswing that led optimists to proclaim the emergence of a "new economy." The now conventional wisdom flows as follows: together with Congress, the Clinton Administration got the ball rolling by balancing the federal budget, and moving it towards surplus. This caused long-term interest rates to fall, which led to an investment boom—especially in the high-tech sectors—and stimulated such interest-sensitive purchases as housing.

All that new investment caused productivity to grow by leaps and bounds. Since productivity—the amount of goods or services that an hour of labor can produce—is the basis of economic growth, this raised incomes across the spectrum. The virtuous circle was completed by the response of the Federal Reserve: because of the surge in productivity, we are told, the Fed didn't have to worry about rapid growth leading to accelerating inflation. Thus the Fed was able to lower short-term rates, and allow for a record-long expansion, with unemployment falling to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent.

Sounds plausible, doesn't it? And familiar. Now let's look at the numbers. Over the course of the business cycle, real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates on mortgages and high-grade corporate bonds fell by only 0.8 percent. This certainly doesn't look like enough to stimulate an investment or housing boom, and it wasn't. Housing barely increased at all, as a percentage of the economy. And if we look at both investment components of GDP (investment plus net exports), the investment share actually declined slightly.

( Read More... | 2979 bytes in body )

No Living Third World Body Ever Had the Sums Lavished On It That are Being Spent on DNA
by Anne Karpf

They say death is a great leveler. They're wrong. Inequality pursues us after life too. Consider Ground Zero. While international attention has shifted to Afghanistan, the vast project of body-part retrieval in Lower Manhattan is probably the most exorbitant expenditure on the dead in our lifetime, and yet remains almost entirely exempt from criticism or debate. Ground Zero has been cordoned off, not only physically, but also politically and financially, though it's a provocative message to the rest of the world, where death comes cheaper.

This is the largest attempt to identify the dead through DNA sampling. In the application of technology to grief, up to a million tissue samples will be examined by forensic pathologists, radiologists, anthropologists and dentists trying to match DNA material from victims' toothbrushes or relatives' mouths with fragments recovered from the twin towers. It's as if the scale of the operation has had to mirror the heft and girth of those buildings. Since this folly is in its early stages (projected time-scale: two years), it's impossible to say what it will cost. At some point a courageous person may call a halt, but there may be further costs, as the many professionals involved will need post-traumatic stress counseling.

( Read More... | 3942 bytes in body )

by Ed Garvey

The last time I dared mention Attorney General John Ashcroft in a column, Sly (WTDY radio's John Sylvester) said he would resign from the Democratic Party in protest over my suggestion that breaking from the Democratic and progressive Republican coalition to be the deciding vote in support of Ashcroft's confirmation was, to be charitable, not Sen. Russ Feingold's finest moment.

So I return to that vote with fear and trepidation. I don't know if Sly ever resigned but I do know that Ashcroft has exceeded all expectations. This guy is dangerous! And now his pal, John Warner, wants in on the action.

( Read More... | 5866 bytes in body )

by James Carroll

IN RECENT DAYS, sage editorial writers, religious leaders, politicians, liberal pundits, and admired columnists have joined in the Donald Rumsfeld-Condoleezza Rice chorus praising the American war in Afghanistan as ''just.''

The Taliban are described as all but defeated. The ''noose'' around bin Laden grows ever tighter. Afghans are seen rejoicing in the streets, and the women among them are liberated. All because the United States turned the full force of its fire power loose on the evil enemy. Anyone still refusing to sign onto this campaign is increasingly regarded as unpatriotic. Next, we will be called ''kooks.''

Not so fast. The broad American consensus that Bush's war is ''just'' represents a shallow assessment of that war, a shallowness that results from three things.

( Read More... | 4194 bytes in body )