The Good Fight, by Ralph Nader

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THE PRIORITIES OF INSTITUTIONAL INSANITY

He came as a penniless youth of fifteen from Syria, put himself through college and Washington University (St. Louis) medical school and settled in Elk City, Oklahoma. In 1929, Dr. Michael Shadid opened the first cooperatively owned hospital in America, which served the impoverished farmers and their families. Dr. Shadid pioneered prepaid group medicine and, against the ferocious opposition of medical societies, spread the doctrine of cooperative medicine allover the United States and Canada. Twenty-five hundred farmers owned their own hospital in Elk City providing medical and health care, both preventative and curative. Their prepayment was a fraction of what they would pay under the usual fee- for-service medicine. Following this inspired, politically astute physician came the prepaid group practice of medicine at Puget Sound and Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast. Imagine controlling your own health care! Fee-for-service held on for most of the century until, in the 1970s, the federal government started promoting Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) on a large scale.

The dream began turning into a nightmare as smaller nonprofit HMOs were replaced by ever-larger for-profit HMOs, hospital chains, and the perennial health insurance company giants. Today, our country is under the yoke of corporate medicine dominating the Washington landscape. It ties the hands and judgment of physicians and nurses, secures and often defrauds the government of huge amounts of taxpayer dollars and, in contrast to nonprofits, delivers poorer, more rationed, more expensive, less accessible, choiceless health care. Obscenely compensated executives contrive to undermine Medicare with your own tax dollars. The picture is not pretty and costs are spinning out of control. A Dartmouth study estimates that almost a third of the health care sub-economy of $1.6 trillion this year goes to either duplicate or useless care or makes matters worse!

You've probably read, or viewed on television, the many exposes of this industry, its denial of care, its overbilling, its rip-off of Uncle Sam, its large monetary settlements with the Justice Department. The benefits go mostly to the CEOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, according to the data provided by the California Nurses Association. HMO overhead and profits as a percent of premium ranged from 14 percent for Pacificare to 33 percent for Cigna in 1999. With big money, ruthless organization, and lobbying, they prevail over superior non-profit health care services that are nonprofit. The latter do not have organized consumer-patient groups to seek and bargain for the best arrangements. Instead, large employer groups, which could be more aggressive and in some recent instances have asserted themselves, routinely deliver groups of employees to these HMOs that have managed through mergers to reduce the level of competition in geographical areas.

One third of all Americans are either uninsured or underinsured. This is the case despite our country spending much more money per capita on health care as does Canada, France, Switzerland, and Sweden, whose universal systems cover everybody in their countries and produce better health outcomes. We're paying as taxpayers, workers, and consumers and still tens of millions of people have no health insurance. That number has been increasing year after year.

The unwritten rule beneath the monetized minds of the HMOs, for-profit hospitals, and the drug companies is "Pay or Die." And die the poor do. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies estimates that about 18,000 Americans die every year because they cannot afford to pay for diagnosis, treatment, or cures. That is 1,500 people a month! What about the preventable sickness, the pain, the family disruption? Add to this human toll the medical malpractice, the medical mistakes, the over-prescription of drugs and their adverse effects, the assembly-line pace of pressured physicians and understaffed nurses, the drug company bribes and kickbacks to many physicians, and it spells mayhem -- a silent form of preventable violence, far greater than many more publicized trauma and disease totals in other sectors.

Years ago, I suggested to a group of psychologists that they expand their research into the mental health or outright insanity of organizations, both corporate and government. They could find fertile ground studying the drug companies for kleptomania, General Motors for endless resistance to being toilet-trained out of its gaseous emissions, the HMOs for attention-deficit disorder. They laughed, but I was serious. Were humans to behave this way, they would be viewed as manifestly deviant.

Jamie Court, whose book Making a Killing: HMOs and the Threat to Your Health, was not just about data, and the aggregate statistics. He documented the travails of many real people -- the consequences of profiteering run amuck. There was five-month-old Chad Aitken who was given vaccine shots that caused a reaction. When his mother called their HMO for assistance, she was told, incorrectly, that her insurance had lapsed and was refused care. Chad died. David Goodrich was diagnosed with stomach cancer but was unable to get HMO approval for recommended treatment. He finally started therapy with his physicians anyway. By then it was too late. He died leaving his wife Teresa, a kindergarten teacher, with $750,000 in medical bills. No wonder nearly half of all personal bankruptcies in this country involve illness or medical debts.

Suffering the Consequences

One of Jamie Court's many poignant cases comes. from the Olsen family. Two-year-old Steven Olsen fell on a twig that punctured his cheek and sinus. A few days later, he developed a fever and his parents took him twice to the urgent care physician. They were told not to be concerned. Steven was lethargic. On the third visit, the little boy was admitted to the HMO-approved hospital where Mrs. Kathy Olsen asked the medical staff to do a CT scan. Since the hospital's contract with the HMO specified that money spent on patients like Steven come out of hospital funds or the monthly per-patient fee paid them from their HMO, there was a tendency to ration care. They told the Olsens that a scan was unnecessary. Three days later, Steven fell into a coma due to a brain abscess that could have been detected easily by a scan. Steven became blind and has cerebral palsy. He and his parents face a lifetime of expensive tests and treatments along with around-the-clock care, pain, anguish, and immense costs.

When I met Steven and his parents -- who were waiting to see their Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) but had to settle for a staffer -- I recalled that HMOs were originally promoted as being keen on prevention. Maybe that belief was premised on a nonprofit HMO. Perverse incentives and awful consequences come from the rampant profit motives of today's commercial HMOs. These HMOs rake off tens of billions of dollars from consumers and taxpayers, yet deliver no health care themselves. These corporations just regulate more and more doctors and nurses and pay for more and more politicians to let them continue their harmful practices. They are indeed a profitable bureaucracy piling up expenses, restricting medical judgments and corporatizing the practice of medicine, just as if their profits are the first and foremost priority. While the American Medical Association was living in the past by rejecting a universal health insurance system, they discovered that in the 1990s more and more of their members fell into a spider's web of private corporate government -- HMO style -- and lost their professional independence. In reaction, thousands of interns, residents, and other physicians, to defend themselves, are doing the formerly unthinkable -- organizing or joining unions.

Physicians are moving toward support of a single-payer, universally accessible and affordable health care system. Polls show the public is already there, even with the massive daily propaganda by the corporations to slander the concept, which is really only a fuller version of Medicare with built-in protections from commercial looting. A very recent survey of physicians in Massachusetts shows about two-thirds favor a single-payer system that preserves choice of doctor and hospital, unlike the current HMO restrictiveness.

Over eleven thousand doctors have already signed on to the Physicians for a National Health Program (NHP) which was drafted by a broad panel of experienced practitioners and professors of medicine. In their book Bleeding the Patient -- The Consequences of Corporate Health Care, describing both the necessity and the practicality of the NHP, Drs. David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, and Ida Hellander write,

Non-profit national health insurance can expand coverage, improve care, and limit costs by slashing health care bureaucracy and outrageous profits. Our resources for care -- hospitals, clinics, high-tech machinery -- are already plentiful, your personnel ready and willing and our current spending levels are sufficient.... Overall, the average American would pay no more for health care under the NHP than they do at present.

The difference is that the coverage would be universal, comprehensive and without co- payments, deductibles, and the other maddening fine print of exclusions and denial of remedies for the patients. Health outcomes would be better also, as the authors demonstrate: "The experience of many nations -- that spend less and get more health care -- proves that national health insurance works." These are nations where workers are paid as much or more than in the United States -- as in Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany.

Only in America

Visitors from these and other countries like France, Italy, and Holland can scarcely believe how American workers (who work longer hours than they do) have to endure what they in their countries take for granted.

In the world's richest country, three-quarters of the millions of uninsured are children or working adults. Long-term health care is not available to their elderly relatives unless they pay directly or demonstrate that they have no assets. Despite the economic boom of the 1990s, eight million more Americans were uninsured at the end of the decade. Workers have to accept paying a higher share of their premiums through co-payments and deductibles -- a major issue in union-management negotiations. The elderly are forced to increase their out-of-pocket costs. Americans go into bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills. Thousands of Americans die every year because they cannot afford health care. Large numbers of other people delay prenatal care or do not see a doctor after discovering a breast lump or chest pain because they cannot pay for the service. Seriously ill patients ask to die because they do not want to burden their families with more bills. Other uninsured citizens are forced to choose between medical care, drugs or food, rent or heat. European visitors shake their heads in disbelief. They give another meaning to the phrase "Only in America." The system is not working.

We really don't have to take this anymore. Already, half of health care in this country is now paid for by taxpayers (Medicare; Medicaid; federal, state, and municipal employee plans; etc.), as well as a large portion of the medical research and support of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Take the $1.6 trillion (and mounting) that will be spent every year (nearly $6,000 per person already, on the average) and shift it to health care -- preventative and treatment -- for the people and away from the canyons of corporate greed and looting of taxpayers, replete with costly bureaucracies, billing fraud and denials of care.

Here is what the NHP would comprise. Every person receives a health care card assuring payment for all needed care. There would be complete free choice of doctor and hospital. Physicians and hospitals would remain independent and nonprofit and negotiate fees and budgets with NHP. There would be far less billing fraud and paperwork (in Canada patients rarely see a bill) for health care providers, patients, and their beleaguered families. There would be far less bureaucratic interference in day-to-day clinical practice. We would learn both from the successes and the mistakes of other nations with universal coverage. I would add that patients would be able to join their own fully staffed consumer watchdog associations through simple voluntary dues check-offs. No longer would the health care system have profit incentives that ignore working with patients for safe workplaces and environments, good diets, exercise, and cessation of addictions. The NHP is both health care, prevention, and a payments system.

My guess is that if the various national groups (unions, church groups, civic organizations) that support the NHP would deploy 1,000 full-time, experienced organizers in the needed congressional districts and states, together with their own additional mobilizations, the present 25 percent of the Congress now in favor of universal health care would grow to a majority in months, not years. Organization and coordination are all that NHP lacks because the general public registers majority support already. Think about it: An oligarchy, with a corporate-dominated government demands the future expenditure of trillions of dollars against projected stateless terrorism. But, it refuses, decade after decade, to put in place a health care and health care payment system to save hundreds of thousands of American lives and prevent larger numbers of injuries and diseases certain to occur year after year. This behavior is not sane. It fits the clinical definition of insanity by deliberately leaving fellow Americans defenseless, having to pay or die, pay or get sicker, pay or stay disabled. No fire department or neighbor would refuse to put out a house fire if the owner was delinquent on her property taxes.

Let's make this point another way. Put yourself in the place of your members of Congress. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a federal agency, has been warning of a coming pandemic from East Asia that could be as devastating as the 1919 influenza epidemic that took almost a million American lives. Infectious disease specialists at the CDC say such a pandemic is overdue. Each year a flu strain is announced and a vaccine is prepared. Often the strain has a Chinese name because the same sequence repeats itself again and again. Ducks or chickens get the flu, give it to the pigs on farms in China. Then it passes to farmers and the virus is off and running to North America and around the world. CDC has about five full-time infectious disease specialists stationed in China to work on early alerts, lab testing, and other indicators with the Chinese authorities. CDC knows that there are not enough specialists there or here, not enough facilities there or here, not enough research and vaccine production capabilities there or here. We are not ready, put simply, for a viral attack that could take more American lives than did World War II. So you are sitting in a congressional chair. You hear that David Kay has returned to Washington, D.C., empty handed after managing 1,500 U.S. inspectors for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction on a budget of $500 million. The entire budget of the CDC is $7.2 billion. Kay was on a mission to vindicate George W. Bush's political reputation and failed. But neither Congress nor George W. Bush appear ready to grapple with saving untold American lives by forestalling the human devastation from a pandemic. Is this sane?

But, then, even in the realm of stateless terrorism, sanity is in short supply. During the early 1970s, during the hijacks of commercial passenger aircraft to Cuba, our aviation safety group began urging the FAA, the airlines, and the aircraft manufacturers to harden cockpit doors and strengthen their latches. Some foreign airlines have done so. Three decades passed and all three of these decision makers could not be bothered. Year after year, they ignored the advice of airline security specialists. It was too expensive, or not necessary. As airline regulator, the permissive FAA has long had what close observers call a "tombstone" mentality. That is, the FAA, at best, acts after crashes point to a problem long known, but ignored. Well, the families of 9/11 victims have learned about the FAA's tombstone mentality the hard way. Finally, on a leisurely schedule, the airlines are now equipping their planes with cockpit doors that would keep hijackers from turning the aircrafts into giant, lethal, fuel-loaded missiles. Were these airline organizations in government and business acting sanely? Can anyone say these are unrealistic priorities? Storekeepers shutter their shops in high crime neighborhoods.

The concentration of greed and power breeds institutional insanity as a matter of course and misdirection. It is driving America backward into the future.

Military vs. Civilian Investment

I wonder how Seymour Melman feels these days. For over half a century, this Columbia University professor of industrial engineering has been meticulously connecting the massive overspending and waste in our military budget With. the de-industrializing of the. United States and the draining of public investment in public works -- repairing the crucial physical capital of America. He sees the permanent war economy weakening the civilian economy and draining the scientific and engineering talent it needs. This results in the loss, he believes, of millions of good paying jobs.

Melman cites the "Report Card for America's Infrastructure" that was issued in 2002 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (asce.org/reportcard). One and a third trillion dollars, the Engineers say, is needed just for repair of twelve categories of public works. These include schools, drinking water systems, solid waste, sewage systems, airports, dams, navigable waterways, public transit, bridges, and roads. Melman's knowledge of U.S. industry is legendary. The federal government's military spending crowds out civil manufacturing whose products repair and modernize America's infrastructure, he states. Unsurprisingly, not one U.S. company submitted a bid in 2002 for supplying a new fleet of subway cars for New York City -- a contract worth $3 to $4 billion.

Other studies have shown that a billion dollars in civilian investment creates considerably more jobs than a billion dollars in a military weapons system. Melman questions why thirteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, this military budget continues to expand the massive redundancy and costliness of weapons systems such as the next wave of fighter planes, missiles, submarines, and aircraft carriers. He sees our domestic economic needs being strip-mined right down to libraries, fire and police departments, sanitation departments, schools, health care, and services for elderly people.

In a more detailed manner than President Eisenhower's famous comparison of the cost of weaponry to civilian needs, Melman shows what we could have by way of domestic public investment if we tame our military expenditures. Jobs in public works in our country are usually good paying jobs in local communities improving public services. Such jobs cannot be outsourced to China. The manufacturing base to supply these public works projects would be expanded with a similar expansion in employment. Melman does not subscribe to the thesis that we can have a prosperous economy without a strong manufacturing foundation and its multiplier effects. He characterized our present economic system not as capitalism but as state capitalism fusing big business with big government.

As an aside, now in his mid-eighties, Melman does his own research and has just written a new book. When I asked him who researched his finding that in the fall 2002 L.L. Bean catalog, 92 out of the 100 products offered were imported, he replied, "I did."

Now, if there is ever a consensus about any jobs programs, investing in public works or infrastructure wins the prize. In communities around the country, support comes from the construction industry; trade unions and workers; the local mayors; the banks; insurance companies; sellers of fuel, food, and real estate; and local chambers of commerce. One could go on and on. Yet, apart from highway funds" the allocations are woefully small. Just ask our only struggling passenger train system -- AMTRAK -- which can scarcely get the $1.5 billion it needs for capital improvements and operating needs each year. In contrast, the missile defense system took $9.1 billion this year and over $140 billion since Reagan's folly got underway. Moreover, according to Professor Theodore Postel and other scientists, the system is unworkable because, among other reasons, it is very easy to decoy.

The Growing Gap

So, if just about everyone back home favors such repair and modernization, why isn't it happening? The easy answer is that the military industrial complex is much more organized and entrenched in Washington, D.C. Right off, a major public works program faces the charge that our country would be plunged into a deficit it cannot afford. That is the usual argument. Well, George W. Bush inherited a surplus. What did he and his supporters in Congress do? They pushed through, over an anemic Democratic Party opposition, two large tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, that will cost far more than the American Society of Civil Engineers' estimate of $1.3 trillion, upgraded in 2003 to $1.6 trillion. Blocking such tax cuts could have led to community rehabilitations. Now, there is a massive deficit, as far as the forecast can predict from tax cuts, justified by President Bush as a way to expand the economy. These tax savings are not going to public investment infrastructure. Nor do rich people who already have far more than they spend rush into the market to spend their newly received mega-tax savings. Last year, Bernard Rapoport, founder of the American Income Life Insurance Company, called me and said: "Ralph, what am I going to do with another $150,000 a year? I've got more money than I can spend. Bush is talking economic nonsense."

Making connections between how the super-rich and corporations rig the tax system in their favor requires dedication -- how they make sure that the IRS has neither the mandate nor budget to audit their schemes needs a further effort of enquiry. We must learn how their lobbyists and PACs go beyond the ways they've already legalized to shift the tax burden to lesser-endowed humans whose children inherit the deficits and interest payments. With this effort and knowledge, we can turn this Great American Rip-Off into a Great American Political Issue before elections.

One sensible and surprising institution involves very rich people like Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and William Gates Sr. Responsible Wealth has over 1,000 rich members opposed to the repeal of the estate tax-a refreshing transcendence of their own economic interest. Gates is so passionate about the reasons and morality behind the estate tax that, in addition to lobbying Congress, he co-authored with Chuck Collins the book Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.

The bookstores have many fine investigative books on tax loopholes, tax breaks, tax shelters, tax havens, and the scurrilous greed of tax escapes, whether super-rich or large companies. Among the best recently are The Cheating of America by Charles Lewis and Bill Allison and Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston. These books help us understand what is going on. Understanding the complex web of connections is essential. Otherwise, people will not see what they are losing where they live, work, and play in the cruel trade- off between consummate greed and public need.

Enter John O. Fox, who after thirty-six years as a Washington tax lawyer quit and moved to western Massachusetts (an exciting civic region). There he has pioneered, teaching undergraduates at Mt. Holyoke College, a course on U.S. tax policy. Fox is on a mission. His new book is titled 10 Tax Questions the Candidates Don't Want You to Ask. Among them are: "Would you limit the home mortgage interest deduction so that it subsidized the purpose of one basic home, and would you redirect some of the tax savings to help qualified renters purchase a basic home? Would you stop giving tax breaks for much higher pension contributions for highly paid employees (managers) than for rank-and-file employees? Should Congress prohibit pension plans from depriving employees of their pensions after they have been employed for at least three years?"

John O. Fox, despite his many years in the grim world of corporate tax law, is idealistic. Given the insipid, stagnant, sloganized, debateless campaign culture, how can reporters, much less voters, get a foot in the door of the bubble that encloses the candidates and their microphones? What does he think that we live in -- the Lincoln-Douglas era when debates continued for hours before large standing audiences?

Let us start evaluating our institutions -- local, state, national, and international -- by the same yardsticks that we judge people. Depersonalization runs rampant and thereby runs away from familiar frameworks of accountabilities. Let's stop the institutional insanity!

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FOREIGN POLICY FOLLIES

The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders. The conduct of foreign policy is equally shortsighted and more undemocratic.

When the president beats the drums of war, the dictatorial side of American politics begins to rear its ugly head. Forget democratic processes, congressional and judicial restraints, media challenge, and the facts. All of that goes out the door. It's the president, stupid -- plus the clique that surrounds him and the vested interests that reflexively support him. Dissenting Americans may hold rallies in the streets, but their voice is drowned out by the bully pulpit.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the resulting quagmire, is Bush's most egregious foreign policy folly, but reflects a broader dynamic. Listen to retired General Wesley Clark's stinging indictment of the administration: "President Bush plays politics with national security. Cowboy talk. The administration is a threat to domestic liberty."

But Clark was a Democratic candidate for president. So let's listen to Michael Kinsley, the respected columnist who has written for Time and the Washington Post, and is now editorial and opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times. In March 2003, Kinsley wrote that "in terms of the power he now claims, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world." An unelected dictator at that.

Bush a dictator? You'd never know it from the words he uses most often -- "freedom," "liberty," "our way of life." You'd never know it from public opinion polls, which respond favorably to an unchallenged jingoism. The politics of fear sells. Cold war politics sold. The war on terrorism sells. But it's a very expensive sale for the American people. Even with the Soviet Union long gone, America's military budget amounts to half the operating federal budget. While vast resources and specialized skills are sucked into developing and producing redundant and exotic weapons of mass destruction, America's economy suffers and its infrastructure crumbles.

As the majority of workers fall behind, Bush has appointed himself ruler of Baghdad and, with the complicity of a fawning Congress, is draining billions of dollars away from rebuilding America's public works -- schools, clinics, transit systems, and the rest of our crumbling infrastructure.

How does Bush sell America on this diversion of funds and focus? With the politics of fear. He, John Ashcroft, and company openly tout the state of permanent war.

Are there no limits to their hubris? The same Bush regime that applies rigid cost-benefit analysis to deny overdue government health and safety standards for American consumers, workers, and the environment sends astronomical budgets to Congress for the war on stateless terrorism. Bush's own Office of Management and Budget throws its hands up and observes that the usual controls and restraints are nowhere in sight. To appropriate runaway spending in the name of homeland security, the powers-that-be need only scream one word: Terrorism!

If you ask the Bushies how much this effort will cost, they recite a convenient mantra: "whatever it takes to protect the American people." In fact, trillions of dollars annually would not suffice to fully secure our ports, endless border crossings by trucks and other vehicles, the rail system, petrochemical and nuclear plants, drinking water systems, shipments of toxic gases, dams, airports and airplanes, and so forth. So "whatever it takes" is actually a prescription for unlimited spending.

Much of the war on terrorism involves domestic guards and snoops. The word "terrorism," endlessly repeated by the president and his associates, takes on an Orwellian quality as a mind-closer, a silencer, an invitation to Big Brother and Bigger Government to run roughshod over a free people who in the past fought real wars without losing their liberties or composure.

A country with numerous and highly complex vulnerable targets cannot be fully secured against determined, suicidal, well-financed and equipped attackers. That obviously doesn't mean we shouldn't take prudent measures to reduce risks, but our allocation of funds must be made realistically, rather than just throwing money at the problem. Domestic security specialists know that we are spending unwisely, but they are not about to blow the whistle. As one expert told me, these specialists do not speak out because they wish to get on the gravy train, gathering lucrative contracts.

Then there's the great unmentionable. If you listen to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and crew, well-financed suicidal al Qaeda cells are all over the country. If so, why haven't any of them struck since September 11? No politician dares to raise this issue, though it's on the minds of many puzzled Americans.. As General Douglas McArthur advised in 1957, and General Wesley Clark much more recently, it is legitimate to ask whether our government has exaggerated these risks facing us, especially when such exaggeration serves political purposes -- stifling dissent, sending government largesse to corporate friends, and deflecting attention from pressing domestic needs.

George Bush willingly moves us toward a garrison state, an American Sparta, through the politics of fear. We're experiencing a wave of militarism resulting in invasive domestic intelligence gathering and disinvestment in civilian economies. The tone of the president becomes increasingly imperial and even un-American. As he once told his National Security Council, "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President ... I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

The president has implied that he occupies his current role by virtue of divine providence. His messianic complex makes him as closed-minded as any president in history. Not only is he immune from self-doubt, but he fails to listen to the citizenry prior to making momentous decisions. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, Bush didn't meet with a single citizens' group opposed to the war. In the weeks leading up to the war, thirteen organizations -- including clergy, veterans, former intelligence officials, labor, business, students -- representing millions of Americans wrote Bush to request a meeting. He declined to meet with a single delegation of these patriotic Americans and didn't even answer their letters.

Bush's authoritarian tendencies preceded the march to Baghdad. First he demanded an unconstitutional grant of authority from Congress in the form of an open-ended war resolution. Our King George doesn't lose sleep over constitutional nuance, especially when members of Congress willingly yield their authority to make war to an eager president.

Next, Bush incessantly focused the public on the evils of Saddam Hussein (a U.S. ally from 1979-1990), specifically how his weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda posed a mortal threat to America. The administration's voice was so loud and authoritative, and the media so compliant, that all other voices -- of challenge, correction, and dissent -- were drowned out.

And so Bush plunged the nation into war based on fabrications and deceptions, notwithstanding notes of caution and disagreement from inside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department. This was a war launched by chicken hawks, counter to the best judgment of battle-tested army officers inside and outside the government.

In retrospect, it seems clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction except those possessed by the invading countries. It also seems clear that Saddam Hussein was a tottering dictator "supported" by a dilapidated army unwilling to fight for him and surrounded by far more powerful hostile nations (Israel, Iran, and Turkey). The notion that this man posed a mortal threat to the strongest nation in the world fails the giggles test.

Bush's war arguably meets the threshold for invoking impeachment proceedings under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. But not a chance with today's compliant, complicit Congress. Not a chance in an environment that considers dissent unpatriotic. An environment in which the media neglects its role as watchdog.

Some brave Americans did speak out against the war, or at least expressed grave reservations. How much coverage did they receive on television or in other mass media? This will go down as a disgraceful chapter in the history of journalism. The media were mostly cheerleaders -- uncritical of the leader, dismissive of dissenters, indifferent to their obligation to search for truth and hold officialdom's feet to the fire, and grateful to the spike in ratings occasioned by the build-up and eventual war. MSNBC, or, in reality, owner General Electric, fired Phil Donahue at least in part for his willingness to criticize the White House war effort.

In the end, the media felt betrayed. David Kay, Bush's chief arms inspector in Iraq, returned in February 2004 after 1,500 inspectors scoured the country, and summed up his findings in a sentence: "We were wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Only then did the media respond with fury at having been duped. Too little, too late. A democratic society needs media to do their job prospectively, not after an unnecessary and pre-emptive war.

What about the leaders of the legal profession, the national and state bar associations, people presumably devoted to the rule of law? You might expect them to speak out. Don't be silly! Apart from select criticisms of enforcement of the Patriot Act, the organized bar has neglected its role as sentinels for our democratic processes. Few lawyers, law school deans, and state attorney generals have met their professional obligations. (There were a few shining exceptions, such as law professors David Cole and Philip Heyman.)

If there was precious little organized resistance to the Bush war from outside government, the situation was even worse within government. The system of checks and balances requires three vigilant branches, but Congress has disgraced itself from virtually the beginning of the Bush administration, assisting an extraordinary shift of power to the executive branch.

In October 2001, a panicked Congress passed the Patriot Act, giving the Bush administration unprecedented powers over individuals suspected (and in some cases not even suspected) of crimes. Two years later, Congress gave the president a virtual blank check to wage a costly war.

In these respects, and others, the war on terrorism has important parallels to the Cold War. Domestically, the latter was characterized by relentless focus on a bipolar world largely dictated by the iron triangle of giant defense companies, Congress, and the military leadership, mutually reinforced with campaign contributions, lucrative contracts, new weaponry, and bureaucratic positions.

A foreign policy responsive to the iron triangle produced some perverse results. The United States overthrew any number of governments viewed as too congenial to similar reforms that our own ancestors fought for -- land reform, workers rights, and neutrality toward foreign countries. We replaced such governments with brutal puppet regimes. We also used our armed forces to protect the interests of the oil, timber, mining, and agribusiness industries.

Actually, such policies long proceeded the Cold War. No one articulated it more clearly or candidly than Marine General Smedley Butler, whose provocative eyewitness accounts rarely made their way into our history books:

I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American Sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"War is a racket," Butler wrote, noting that it tends to enrich a select few. Not the ones on the front lines. "How many of the war millionaires shouldered a rifle?" he asked rhetorically. "How many of them dug a trench?"

Butler devoted a chapter of his long-ignored book, War Is a Racket, to naming corporate profiteers. He also recounted the propaganda used to shame young men into joining the armed forces, noting that war propagandists stopped at nothing: "even God was brought into it." The net result? "Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability."

Does this all sound familiar? The September 11 attack gave rise to a corporate profiteering spree, including a demand for subsidies, bailouts, waivers from regulators, tort immunity, and other evasions of responsibility. Before the bodies were even recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center, the Wall Street Journal was editorializing that its corporate patrons should seize the moment.

Foreign policy amounts to more than national defense, and national defense amounts to more than a mega-business opportunity for weapons and other contractors. All too often, corporate sales priorities have driven defense priorities, leading to militarization of foreign policy.

Consider the 1990's "peace and prosperity" decade, possibly the greatest blown opportunity of the twentieth century. In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed in a bloodless implosion. Suddenly we faced the prospect of an enormous "peace dividend," an opportunity for massive savings or newly directed expenditures since the main reason for our exorbitant military budget had disappeared.

Not so fast, said the military-industrial complex, there must be another major enemy out there -- maybe Communist China, or a resurgent Russia, or some emerging nation developing nuclear weapons. We allegedly needed to prepare for the unknown, hence went full-speed ahead with billions for missile defense technology. In the battle for budget allocations, what chance did the "repair America" brigades have against the military- industrial complex? More B-2 bombers or repaired schools? F-22s or expansion of modern health clinics? More nuclear submarines or upgraded drinking water systems? We know who won those battles. And after 9/11, it was no contest.

As the perceived threat shifted from the Soviet Union to stateless terrorism, the weapons systems in the pipeline from the Cold War days moved toward procurement. On top of that is the chemical, biological, surveillance, detection, intelligence budgets to deal with the al Qaeda menace. Everything is added, almost nothing displaced.

We are constantly told by politicians and the anti-terrorist industry that 9/11 "changed everything." This sentiment suggests the lack of proportionality of our new permanent war. It's also a sentiment that must make Osama bin Laden ecstatic. Bin Laden wanted to strike fear in America. He did so, and then watched as the first response to this fear was a crackdown on anyone with a Muslim or Arab name or visage. Thousands were detained or arrested or jailed on the flimsiest of suspicions, opening the Bush administration up to the charge of hypocrisy when we challenge Islamic nations about due process violations. All of this created more contempt for America among young people throughout the Middle East, no doubt helping the recruiting efforts of our enemies.

Bin Laden must have delighted in attempting to push America toward becoming a police state and sowing discord among us. He must have been thrilled by red and orange alerts, inconvenience at airports, all kinds of excessive expenditures damaging our economy. And bin Laden must have taken perverse delight in press reports that Bush believes he was put on this earth by God to win the war on terrorism. Bin Laden met his counterpart when it comes to a messianic impulse. If he wished to inspire a clash of civilizations, he apparently found a willing collaborator in Bush.

As all this suggests, America's response to 9/11 was not only disproportionate but also counterproductive. Recently on ABC's Nightline, a Washington think tank fellow said something sensible: "When you are fighting terrorism, you want to do it in a way that does not produce more of it." Are we doing that?

Terrorism takes many forms, as in the Sudan, as in the Rwanda rampage that claimed 800,000 lives, the state terrorism of dictators, the added terrorism of hunger, disease, sex slavery, and man-made environmental disasters. With no major state enemy left, what can we do to prevent and diminish these various forms of terrorism, as well as deter more suicidal attacks from fundamentalists? Perhaps we need to redefine national security, redirect our mission, reconsider our relations with other countries.

Starting with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether cause or pretext, this conflict gives rise to widespread animosity against the United States, the chief ally and supplier of economic and military aid to Israel. The outlines of a peaceful resolution are known and supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians -- a two-state solution creating a viable, independent Palestinian nation with its capital in East Jerusalem and in charge of its own air, water, land, and boundaries. Compensation of Palestinians for lost property, and the return of some refugees to Israel to rejoin their relatives are issues warranting negotiation.

To make peace a reality, the United States must connect with the peace movement in Israel. The "refuseniks" -- veteran Israeli officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (over 1,300 of them) -- have rejected duty in the Occupied Territories. Their declaration states: "We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people." (For their entire statement, see www.seruv.org.il. ) PEACE NOW has been pushing the Israeli government to seek peace through negotiations and mutual compromise. In a recent call-to-action, PEACE NOW said, "A small minority of settlers has taken over the government and country. The disengagement plan has failed -- and the government of Sharon and Lapid are not offering any alternative options for an end to the conflict!" Within the Knesset, leaders of the Meretz Party have been very critical of Sharon's policies. MK Yossi Sarid (a leader of the Meretz Party), referring to Sharon said, "You don't have the right to destroy Menachem Begin's life work, and his establishment of peace with Egypt, and you don't have the right to destroy the labors of Yitzhak Rabin's life, and his forging of peace with Jordan." Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun, is an outspoken critic of occupations by both Israel and the United States. Rabbi Lerner said, "The Bush/Sharon axis of occupation has little chance of bringing lasting peace, but they may bring temporary electoral advantages, even as they erode the moral authority of two countries which could have been beacons of hope and instead have become symbols of insensitivity and arrogance."

Unfortunately, our government has supported the Sharon government, which remains dominated by those who believe that Israel can achieve a military solution to the conflict. America cannot effectively mediate peace unless it is seen as pro-Palestinian as well as pro-Israeli. We can start by recognizing that there is far greater freedom inside Israel than in America to discuss candidly the conditions of the conflict.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has observed, interviewed, and thought about how to break the cycle of violence in this conflict between a massively more powerful Israel and its Palestinian adversaries, both of whom he has criticized.

On February 5, 2004, his column evidenced his frustration with the governments of Israel and the United States:

Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year -- all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.

A second task for a redirected national security strategy involves arms control -- reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. This requires choosing between encouraging the lucrative private export of arms (the current position) or seeking the systematic diminution of such lethal trafficking.

There's been much good work in this area, both by the Arms Control unit of the Defense Department and by various private prominent scientists and disarmament experts. There have also been setbacks, including the Bush administration's rejection of the ABM Treaty and the Clinton administration's rejection of treaties abolishing landmines and prohibiting the trafficking in small arms.

The goals of Mid-East peace and worldwide disarmament would both benefit from a shift toward more multilateralism. We must work with friends and neighbors to address all the problems of this tormented world -- settling conflicts, heading off human and ecological disasters, early detection of epidemics, spreading peaceful scientific and technological advances, and making available proven solutions to all areas of the world.

An energized and serious media is indispensable. Our media traffic in the trivial, devoting thousands of prime-time hours to the trials and tribulations of Madonna, Michael Jackson, O. J. Simpson, Tanya Harding, and the like. But how many Americans have heard of the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program? This report makes a great case for global optimism, demonstrating the availability of inexpensive life-saving measures. For far less than we spend on gambling, or cosmetics, and cigarettes, the world could have health, clean drinking water, and schooling. We are sorely in need of what William James called the "moral equivalent of war." We should declare war on worldwide misery and deprivation, and contribute to raising the quality of life for billions of people worldwide.

In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the innovative thinker and architect Buckminster Fuller used to astonish audiences with a detailed explanation of how world poverty could be ended with an annual expenditure equivalent to one month's spending on weapons. Billions of devastated lives later, Fuller's plan remains unfulfilled.

The late James Grant, one of America's unsung heroes and the head of UNICEF, helped save millions of young lives by negotiating entry into countries where deadly diseases could be easily prevented. My Princeton class of 1955 formed a global tuberculosis project to call attention to the relative ease with which this destroyer of two million lives a year could be combated.

Slowly but surely, the World Health Organization, prodded by various private and public foundations, has been highlighting the need for a multinational assault on global infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria. At long last, Western Economists recognize what rural villages have known forever -- disease undermines economic development. Fighting disease is justified on economic as well as human grounds.

Democracy is also good for economic development, but only if done properly. Today, spreading democracy has become a mantra for plutocratic propaganda and a justification for unwise actions like the invasion of Iraq. If the Bush administration wants to spread democracy, it doesn't have to do so with tanks and missiles. We can nurture democratic growth in the Third World by assisting institutions already in place. In some cases, we have done the reverse. For example, over the decades, Washington has reduced the very modest contributions to the American University of Cairo and the American University of Beirut, even though these universities are rare success stories in a troubled region.

Power without accountability is a bad formula, and a commonplace one in the conduct of foreign policy. Our government spends billions for blunders, and no one is forced to resign. Our government violates our own laws and international laws, and reporters never ask, "What is the legal authority for this operation?" Our government props up brutal regimes and turns millions of people against us, and justifies such actions with a slogan -- fighting communism, or a war on terrorism, or a war on drugs.

The foreign policy and intelligence agencies operate in secrecy and rarely have to explain themselves, even to each other. (The 9/11 Commission provides a welcome exception, but received a chilly reception from the Bush administration.) Federal Judge Damon Keith wrote, "democracy dies behind closed doors." The U.S. Constitution requires publication of the government budget, but when an American citizen challenged the secrecy of the CIA budget in federal court, the case was dismissed. The judge said that this taxpayer had no legal standing to bring the action. Then who does have standing -- the attorney general? Don't hold your breath waiting for the attorney general to sue his own president.

There's an impressive catalog of actions taken by our government and shrouded in secrecy: illegal spending, government overthrows, corporate tax havens, sovereignty-shredding trade agreements, circumventing our courts and agencies, taking nuclear waste from other countries, and allowing advanced weaponry and data to be sold by companies to oppressive regimes. Often such actions remain unknown and unchallenged. (A few years ago, the General Accounting Office explained that the sprawling Pentagon budget is unauditable. A one-day news story, long forgotten.)

In 2000, Chalmers Johnson, a professor and former naval officer, wrote a book called Blowback and defined the word, invented for internal use by the CIA, as follows: "the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people." Johnson explains that the actions of terrorists, drug lords, rogue states, and arms merchants "often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations." Johnson's book is devoted to instances of blowback and their cumulative impact. These boomerangs, he writes, "hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control."

Our government acts in our name. When it resorts to violence or bribery abroad, or supports crude force on ordinary people to benefit repressive regimes and global corporations, the American people should know about it. When billions of our taxpayer dollars go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and workers worldwide get their wages and services cut and taxes raised because of "structural adjustments" imposed by the IMF, Americans are entitled to be in the loop.

In his book Fortress America, William Grieder asks a fundamental question: "Are the armed forces deployed in behalf of U.S.-based multinationals or U.S. citizens?" Grieder believes that our national defense policy does not serve the interests of our citizenry, but there is no debate on this subject. He claims the American people are "open to more dramatic changes in national defense than a status quo Washington imagines. They await a real debate."

We wait and we wait. But citizens have an obligation to at least try and learn what our government is doing abroad, especially since our government acts in our name. Apart from ethnic groups interested in the "old country," Americans pay far too little attention to foreign policy. This is regrettable. Americans have too much goodness and too much talent not to play a more fundamental role than that of passive spectator. America's foreign policy might not consist of a succession of follies if it were conducted and monitored more democratically.

[admin]

GLOBALIZATION

In approving the far-reaching, powerful WTO and smaller international trade agreements, such as NAFTA, the U.S. Congress, like the governments of other nations, has accepted harsh legal limitations on what domestic policies it may pursue and thus ceded much of its capacity to protect citizens. This new governing system is designed to exert control over minute details in the lives of the majority of the world's people. This system is structured not to enhance the well-being of human beings, but rather the well-being of the world's largest corporations and financial institutions.

Unlike members of Congress, Big Business knew what the WTO agreements contained. That's because corporate lobbyists helped draft them. Big Business has crafted these agreements to circumvent national and local governmental democratic processes, to undermine citizens' ability to force effective regulation of corporate activity, and to lock in rules that enable corporations to shut plants in one country and move elsewhere, even to a country under the thumb of a repressive regime, with virtually no restrictions.

Under these trade deals, U.S. and other nations' laws, whether federal, state, or local, must comply with the special business-friendly rules of the trade agreements. Laws to protect consumers, or to ensure that products are not made with child labor, or to safeguard the environment -- all such laws risk being decreed impermissible "nontariff trade barriers" under the tricky rules of trade agreements.

Secret tribunals established by the trade agreements render binding judgment on U.S. and other national laws. If the secret tribunals declare an American consumer protection law, say, to be in violation of WTO, NAFTA, or some other agreement, the United States has a choice: change the law or pay fines or accept sanctions to maintain it. The potential sanctions are so severe that governments now regularly repeal laws, or even withdraw them from consideration, lest they be challenged at the WTO or another trade body.

These are thus pull-down agreements: They pull down our accumulated victories and achievements in the areas of wages and hours, union organizing, food safety protection, consumer safeguards, and protections for our natural environment, among others, and have a chilling effect on future advances. For example:

• The WTO ruled that the United States must revise the gasoline cleanliness rules adopted to implement the Clean Air Act. The oil companies had tried to block these rules in U.S. courts and failed. But a successful challenge to the rules at the WTO by Venezuela led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt replacement regulations, rules that the agency itself had previously rejected as unenforceable.
• In 1997, Massachusetts passed a law saying that it would not do business with companies doing business in Burma, which is governed by a vicious military dictatorship. The European Union challenged the law at the WTO, saying Massachusetts did not have the right to refuse to contract with European companies based on where they did business. Shortly thereafter, Maryland considered a similar law for companies doing business in Nigeria, then also ruled by brutal dictatorship. The bill was unexpectedly defeated, after the U.S. State Department -- which feared it would spark another WTO challenge -- testified against it. (The Massachusetts law was ultimately overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, as an interference with Congress's power to regulate foreign commerce.)
• Laws that prohibit the import of goods made with child labor (several of which been proposed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin) are flat-out illegal under the WTO whose rules say an importing country cannot be concerned with the process by which an imported product is manufactured, except in the case of prison labor.
• The United States, operating at the behest of the biotech industry, has announced its intention to file a WTO challenge to a European de facto moratorium on approval of genetically modified crops. The United States says, correctly, that WTO rules require countries to accept food products unless they can prove them unsafe with a high degree of scientific certainty. The Europeans' position -- one that should be adopted in the United States -- is that they do not want to expose consumers to biotech foods until they are shown to be safe. But this application of the Precautionary Principle asks that proof of safety be supplied by the entity introducing a new product. As such, it conflicts with the WTO's corporate-friendly rules.

The threatened action on biotech foods follows an earlier case at the WTO, where the United States successfully challenged a European ban on the import of hormone- treated beef. To preserve this consumer protection measure, Europe must now pay an annual fine to the United States.
• The WTO requires countries to adopt the pesticide and food safety standards maintained by an industry-dominated international organization based in Rome, called the Codex Alimentarius. Codex standards permit higher residues of many dangerous chemicals on foods than do U.S. rules, meaning these food safety rules could be ruled in violation of WTO mandates.
• In their important book, Whose Trade Organization?, Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall report: "At its 1999 meeting, the Codex approved maximum residue levels for the pesticide methyl parathion that did not take into account the impact of the level on children, as is required by U.S. law. Two months after Codex made the methyl parathion determination the U.S. EPA banned the use of the chemical on fruits and vegetables because of the risk it posed to children. As a result, the U.S. regulation is now exposed to challenge under the WTO ... because it provides greater protection than the WTO-recognized international standard."

Perhaps nothing has shifted as much power to multinational corporations as the investment chapter of NAFTA, known as Chapter 11. Chapter 11 contains two key features: First, it provides an array of strong protections against government action or regulation that might affect foreign investors. One gift to corporations is a prohibition on "expropriation," or actions "tantamount" to expropriation, except for public purpose and with fair market value compensation. In theory, expropriation would seem to apply only in cases where a government exercised eminent domain, such as taking over a factory. But in NAFTA, the definition is far, far more expansive. The second key feature of Chapter 11 is that it permits investors to bring suit for compensation directly against governments that have allegedly infringed on their investment rights.

NAFTA's Chapter 11 has provided the basis for a number of eyebrow-raising cases. In the largest Chapter 11 suit yet brought against the United States, in 1999 the Canadian corporation Methanex sued the U.S. government for $970 million because of a California executive order phasing out the sale of a Methanex product. Methanex claims that California's phase-out of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a gasoline additive, violates the company's special investor rights granted under NAFTA because the California policy limits the corporation's ability to sell MTBE. MTBE poisons groundwater. Methanex says that instead of banning MTBE, California should enforce rules prohibiting improper disposal. This case is pending.

The MTBE case is reminiscent of a 1998 case brought against Canada by the U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation. In that case, Ethyl sued Canada for $250 million after Canada banned the gasoline additive methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT) because of health risks. The state of California had banned MMT and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was working on a similar regulation. Ethyl claimed the Canadian ban violated NAFTA because it "expropriated" future profits and damaged Ethyl's reputation. After learning that the NAFTA tribunal was likely to rule against its position, the Canadian government revoked the ban, paid Ethyl $13 million for lost profits, and, as part of a settlement with Ethyl, agreed to issue a public statement declaring that there was no evidence that MMT posed health or environmental risks.

In another pending case, the U.S.-based United Parcel Service (UPS) is pursuing a NAFTA Chapter 11 case against Canada for $100 million, arguing that the Canadian postal service's involvement in the courier business infringes upon the profitability of UPS operations. Canada Post is a government-owned corporation that does not receive public subsidies. Nevertheless, in this case, the first NAFTA investor-to-state case against a public service, UPS claims that by integrating the delivery of letter, package, and courier services, Canada Post has cross-subsidized its courier business in breach of NAFTA rules. For example, UPS argues that permitting consumers to drop off courier packages in Canada Post mailboxes unfairly advantages Canada Post as against other courier services.

Yes, you read this right. According to UPS, to comply with NAFTA, Canada Post should have separate boxes to drop off courier packages, picked up by nonpostal worker personnel, taken to separate facilities, processed by workers who don't handle the regular mail, and delivered by personnel not associated with the regular mail. This case is still pending. The United States, Canada, and Mexico should amend NAFTA, if they chose not to repeal it entirely, by revoking this notorious Chapter 11 immediately.

The Ravages of Corporate Globalization on America

The pull-down effect is imposed through other means, as well. U.S. corporations long ago learned how to pit states against each other in "a race to the bottom" to profit from whatever state would offer lower wages, pollution standards, and taxes. In the world of corporate globalization, companies pit countries against each other. When one city, state, or country works to ensure that corporations pay their fair share of taxes, provide their employees a decent standard of living, or limit pollution, they are typically met with the refrain: "You can't burden us like that. If you do, we won't be able to compete. We'll have to close down and move to a country that offers us a more hospitable climate."

Complying with the much too modest standards of the international global warming treaty would "harm U.S. competitiveness," alleges a leading U.S. business-backed study on global warming. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions would be "suicidal for competitiveness," British industry told the U.K. government in January 2004. In the face of such warnings, and the implicit threat that jobs will move elsewhere, governments are reluctant, to say the least, to act. As a result, the rich countries have moved at a snail's pace to confront global warming, probably one of the greatest looming threats to planetary well-being.

Frequently, the threats by industry to close or move factories are a bluff But often they are not, especially when it comes to the matter of wages. Two parallel developments are proceeding at a stunning pace: U.S. manufacturers are closing factories, in large part either because they can't compete with low-wage competitors in China or elsewhere. And large multinationals like General Electric are themselves shifting operations from the United States to low-wage havens abroad.

In significant part due to the ravages of corporate globalization, the United States has lost more than two million manufacturing jobs since 2001. The much-pruned but still vital manufacturing centers of the Midwest have been devastated, whole communities ripped apart by plant closings.

For example, Galesburg, Illinois, a town of34,000, is dealing with the pain of the closure of a Maytag refrigerator manufacturing plant. The factory employed 1,600 in good-paying jobs, and provided jobs to one-in-twelve adults in the local workforce, according to the Chicago Tribune. Maytag said it had no choice but to move its factory to Mexico, so it could match the lower production costs of Whirlpool and General Electric, which have already shifted much of their manufacturing out of the United States. On the day of the closing announcement, Diana Stephenson, who worked at the plant for twenty-eight years, told the Chicago Tribune; "I never saw chins drop so far, with men and women crying. Everybody that talked to me was worried about their children and their future."

More than half-a-million U.S. workers have been certified under one narrow government retraining program as having lost their jobs due to NAFTA. And notwithstanding predictions from NAFTA's backers to the contrary, these job losses have not been offset by new jobs in facilities manufacturing for export to Mexico. Of course, it's not exactly clear that NAFTA's corporate backers ever believed these rationalizations for entering into the agreement.

Corporate globalization provides big companies seemingly endless routes to escape the civilizing effects of citizen controls and imposed obligations-like taxes. Business has long been masterful at devising loopholes and shelters to avoid paying taxes, of course, but globalization has significantly enhanced their escape capacities.

In a particularly brazen move, more than two dozen major U.S. corporations have reincorporated offshore in order to lower their tax rate. The reincorporated companies don't close their U.S. headquarters; they simply engage in the paper transaction of filing incorporation papers in a tax haven country. One Ernst & Young tax partner put it plainly to the New York Times: "We are working through a lot of companies who feel that ... just the improvement on earnings is powerful enough that maybe the patriotism issue needs to take a back seat."

But the reincorporation gambit is small potatoes compared to the more exotic offshore tax shelters used by Halliburton and others. Employing such devices as tax payment deferrals, income stripping, and parking intangibles offshore, multinationals manipulate their assets and income to avoid billions in taxes. Montana Senator Max Baucus, ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee estimates that offshore tax shelters cost the public treasury $70 billion a year. Then there's the transfer-pricing maneuver, by which companies manipulate internal transactions between subsidiaries to shift income to the subsidiaries located in lower tax national jurisdictions. North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan estimates the annual cost of transfer pricing at more than $50 billion.

Corporate Globalization Ravages the Third World

The damage done to the United States by corporate globalization pales in comparison to the violence inflicted on the Third World. With weaker governments and frail civic institutions, most of the Third World is far less able to counterbalance the growing power of multinational corporations. Consider the following snapshots from around the world.

HIV/AIDS-Drug Availability

HIV/AIDS now ranks as perhaps the worst pandemic in the history of the world. More than forty million people worldwide are HIV-positive. For all but a few, an HIV diagnosis is a preventable death sentence.

Existing treatments, which enable many people with HIV/AIDS in the United States and Other industrialized countries to live relatively healthy lives, are unavailable to 98 percent to 99 percent of the people in developing countries.

Life-saving HIV/AIDS drug cocktails cost more than $10,000 a year in the United States and other rich countries. Until recently, that was the price throughout the developing world and even in Africa -- where the epidemic has hit worst and where per capita income is typically little more than a dollar a day. The drugs cost so much not because they are expensive to manufacture, but because the brand-name companies have patent monopolies that prevent price-lowering competition.

Manufacturers in India, where drug patents will not come into force until 2005, are able to make AIDS drug cocktails for as little as $140 per person per year -- less than 2 percent of the price companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, and Boehringer Ingelheim were charging just a few years ago. Once the Indian companies entered the market and offered dramatic discounts, the brand-name companies started lowering their prices -- but they still typically charge four or more times the generic price.

Under the terms of the WTO's intellectual property agreement, all developing countries must provide patents on pharmaceuticals. However, there are safeguards that permit any country to authorize generic competition for pharmaceuticals or other products while they stay on patent. For years, the Clinton administration told countries it was unacceptable to use these safeguards, but that policy changed after protest by citizen groups like the Consumer Project on Technology and AIDS activist organizations Health GAP and ACT UP.

Still, the U.S. Trade Representative, who effectively works as an arm of the drug companies, is coercing developing countries into entering new trade agreements, Such agreements protect the monopolies of brand-name drug companies. Countries in the WTO will not be allowed to exercise their own safety standards. In addition, drug companies themselves lobby and threaten governments in developing countries. Often such countries suppress the generic cheaper competition that could save millions of dollars and help control HIV/AIDS. This ghastly economic imperialism epitomizes the immorality of monopoly power.

Smoking -- Merchants of Death

With sales declining in, increasingly health-conscious richer countries, the Big Tobacco companies have pinned their future on expanding into the developing world and the former Eastern bloc. Some companies feature marketing and advertising campaigns that deceptively tie smoking with youthful rebellion, Western notions of freedom and sophistication, and hipness -- and thereby work to addict children to a lifetime of smoking. Shamefully, many of their ads feature pop music or sports stars. The tobacco merchants of disease increasingly target women and girls, who often have far lower smoking rates than males.

After the U.S. government forced open markets in Asia-to-U.S. cigarette imports in the 1980s and 1990s, overall smoking rates increased by 10 percent, according to the World Bank. In the year after the South Korean market opened, smoking rates among teenaged girls quintupled. The tobacco industry is a grim reaper in waiting. Globally, the World Health Organization predicts that tobacco use will kill ten million people a year by 2025, with 70 percent of these deaths in developing countries. The numbers are unfathomable.

When countries try to enact appropriate health regulations, they may find themselves facing threats under trade agreements. For example, tobacco companies have argued that having to put large warnings on cigarette packs violates their guaranteed trademark rights. They have even suggested that such requirements in Canada are tantamount to an expropriation under NAFTA's Chapter 11.

Structural Adjustments

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, two institutions that have little if any direct affect on the U.S. economy, exercise decisive and destructive influence over the economies of much of the developing world.

Based in Washington, D.C., the IMF provides loans to developing countries with balance of payment difficulties, helping them pay debts to foreign creditors. Private lenders and other public lenders generally will not lend to troubled economies unless they have a loan agreement with the IMF The IMF, whose decision making is controlled by the rich countries, in particular the United States, makes its loans on the condition that borrowing countries agree to a set of maniacal edicts known as "structural adjustment." Imagine all the other ways that taxpayer dollars, given to the IMF, could be used to truly help people in less developed countries. Over the past two decades, the World Bank, which also makes loans for infrastructure and other projects in developing Countries," has joined the IMF in making loans for structural adjustment. The results have been devastating.

In the two regions with the most structural adjustment experience, per capita income has stagnated (Latin America) or plummeted (Africa). Structural adjustment policies call for the sell-off of government-owned enterprises and services -- including functions such as tax collection that are fundamentally government responsibilities -- to private owners, often foreign investors. Privatization is typically associated with layoffs and pay cuts for workers in the privatized enterprises, and often the giveaway of valuable assets to privileged insiders. That's how Russia and Mexico corruptly became home to such a high number of the world's billionaires.

Many IMF and World Bank loans call for the imposition of "user fees" -- charges for the use of government-provided services like schools, health clinics, and clean drinking water. For impoverished people, even modest charges may effectively deny access to services. When the World Bank mandated that Kenya impose charges of $2.15 for sexually transmitted disease clinic services, attendance fell 35 percent for men and 60 percent for women. Similar results have been seen throughout the developing world.

Under structural adjustment programs, countries open up their economy to unregulated imports, and undertake a variety of measures to promote exports. Removing protections for local industry and agriculture has an even harsher impact than in rich countries. In Mozambique, for example, the IMF and World Bank ordered the removal of an export tax on cashew nuts. The result: 10,000 adults, mostly women, lost their jobs in cashew nut- processing factories. Most of the processing work shifted to India, where child laborers shell the nuts at home. In Mexico, since adoption of NAFTA, more than a million corn farmers have been driven off the land, unable to compete with cheap U.S. imports produced on highly mechanized farms.

The relentless focus by structural adjustment orders on exports comes at the expense of production for domestic needs. In the rural sector, the export orientation is often associated with the displacement of poor people who grow food for their own consumption as their land is taken over by large plantation owners (who benefit from government assistance) growing crops for foreign markets.

Oil Equates to Destruction

For years, Nigeria was ruled by one of the world's most brutal and corrupt dictatorships. Oil revenue kept the dictatorship afloat. Multinational oil companies like Shell and Chevron pumped the black gold from the oil-rich Nigeria Delta. When the Ogoni people, who live in the Delta, protested the dictatorship and the oil-drilling operations despoiling their land, the military responded with a crackdown. It executed the Ogonis eloquent leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and other Ogoni leaders.

No thanks to the oil companies, a fed-up populace managed to usher in a transition from Nigeria's dictatorship to a struggling democratic regime. But oil drilling remains destructive in Nigeria. The Ogoni and other ethnic groups have suffered as their land, air, and water have been despoiled by the oil companies, through flaring of gas, repeated spills, poor pipeline placement, and unlined toxic waste pits.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian case is typical of oil company operations in developing countries. The oil giants have a record of coddling dictators, trashing the environment, and wrecking local communities dependent on now-polluted streams and no-longer fertile lands.

In Burma, for example, Unocal and other companies are building a gas pipeline to Thailand. Funds from that project -- which activists claim benefited from slave labor employed by the government -- are propping up Burma's military junta. In Ecuador, tens of thousands of indigenous people charge that Texaco's operations destroyed the streams and natural environment they depend on for survival. In Chad, Exxon-Mobil is leading a consortium developing an oil project that threatens ecologically vulnerable areas and is projected to lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS (via new roads, migration, and increased prostitution). The Chad government spent $4.5 million of its first oil-related revenues on weapons; the government had promised to spend the money on poverty alleviation. In Indonesia, people living in Aceh Province, in North Sumatra, charge that Mobil Oil contracted with the Indonesian military to provide security for a natural gas project, and that the military units committed widespread human rights violations.

Plundering Our Neighbors

Corporate globalization has ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth and income inequality. Corporate and financial plunder of developing countries-and the transfer of money from the masses to a narrow elite in almost all countries, rich and poor -- has led to a shameful concentration of wealth and privilege.

Global inequalities now reach staggering levels. The four hundred highest income earners in the United States make as much money in a year as the entire population of twenty African nations -- more than 300 million people. The richest three hundred and fifty people in the world hold more wealth than the bottom three billion.

Again these income and wealth inequalities translate into far-reaching social inequalities. For example, a person born in a high-income country can expect to live half as long again as someone born in a less-developed country. A person in a less-developed country is twenty-five times more likely to die from tuberculosis than someone in a high-income country.

Confronting Corporate Globalization

As overwhelming as the odds seem of curbing corporate globalization and directing the global economy in a more humane and ecologically sustainable direction, citizens across the planet have achieved major victories against entrenched corporate power. That's one reason corporate globalizers prefer to negotiate trade and investment agreements in secret, behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, preferably with no public awareness whatsoever.

Just a few years ago, the World Trade Organization was a little known global agency, and most people wouldn't know it from the World Tourism Organization (a small U.N. agency). That changed in Seattle in 1999. There, following on years of organizing from groups like Public Citizen and dozens of church groups and worker organizations, tens of thousands of people went to the streets to protest the WTO's corporate orientation. The inspiring street protests, combined with an empowered grouping of African governments, undermined the efforts of rich countries to expand WTO powers to further benefit multinationals. Such efforts have mostly stalled ever since.

A year earlier, an international network of civic organizations thwarted a U.S.-European attempt to craft an international investment agreement, known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). The MAI would have taken NAFTA's Chapter 11 to a global scale. But activists obtained a copy of the draft agreement, which was being negotiated in secret, posted it on the Internet, and developed careful and detailed analyses that showed how far-reaching the agreement would be. The deal couldn't survive public scrutiny, and it soon crumbled.

Civic groups have become especially adept at campaigning against particular corporate abuses, achieving numerous victories. The anti-sweatshop campaigns on campuses have forced universities to take responsibility for how apparel displaying their logos is made. Campaigns targeting shoe and apparel makers such as Nike and the Gap have highlighted working conditions in places where the subcontractors produce for these firms. The firms have been forced to accept at least some responsibility for improving conditions. The Burma solidarity campaign has pressured almost every major company except the oil corporations to end their investments in Burma and cut off trade with the country.

Other victories abound. The campaign for access to essential medicines has completely changed the framework for global patent issues. It has helped drop the price of AIDS drugs by more than 98 percent. It has shaped international opinion that public health needs must not be subordinated to commercial interests.

A small Colombian indigenous group, the U'wa, networked with supporters worldwide to defeat plans by Occidental Petroleum to drill for oil in their historic lands. Among other tactics, the U'wa threatened to commit collective suicide if Occidental carried out its drilling plans. Citizen campaigns all over the world have dashed the dreams of the nuclear power industry to spread its dangerous technology. No new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in decades and Germany is now undertaking a long-term phase-out of nuclear power.

Thanks to the work of Results, Essential Action, and other groups, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring the U.S. representatives to the IMF and World Bank to oppose loans from those institutions that included user fees for basic health care and education. The institutions haven't come fully around, but the World Bank has backed off from supporting school fees. As a result, 1.5 million additional children -- mostly girls -- are now enrolled in school in Tanzania.

Citizen campaigns have also succeeded in crafting a people-centered globalization, which is starting to lift health, safety, and environmental standards rather than dragging them down WTO-style. For example, driven by tobacco-control citizen groups, countries adopted the world's first public health treaty in 2003. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control calls for a comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (with an exception for countries, such as the United States, which deem such a ban unconstitutional), large health warnings, and measures to confront widespread smuggling of tobacco products.

Environmental groups have successfully lobbied and campaigned for a range of important environmental agreements, among them a ban on the export of hazardous waste. Before the treaty was adopted, waste brokers simply dumped rich countries' wastes in poor nations.

Meanwhile, in every country, citizens are banding together to create people-controlled institutions, outside of the control of the multinational corporate predators, that meet human needs.

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh specializes in micro-credit -- small loans at reasonable interest rates to enable people to become entrepreneurs and escape the grip of local loan sharks. The success of the Grameen Bank has sparked global interest in micro-credit, which is helping develop local economies throughout the developing world.

As Michael Barratt Brown documents in Africa's Choices, successful cooperative and other small-scale economic development projects -- frequently led by women -- are proliferating throughout Africa. He points to everything from goat and sheep projects in Niger to soap-making cooperatives in Tanzania.

In Brazil, the rural association of landless workers known as the MST has specialized in self-help land redistribution. In a country with one of the most unequal income and wealth distributions in the world, large landowners leave fertile land untilled while thousands and thousand of poor rural workers have no land whatsoever. The MST organizes peaceful takeovers of the unused land, parceling it out to the poor who will use it.

These civic efforts to counter corporate globalization are united by the vision of a political economy oriented to satisfying people's needs rather than corporate imperatives. It emphasizes the importance of orienting local economies first to meet local needs, especially in the area of food production. For reasons of environmental sustainability and corporate accountability, it favors, in the phrase of economist Herman Daly, "balanced trade" and short supply lines -- meaning purchases and sales should be made locally before regionally, regionally before nationally, nationally before globally.

No one denies the importance of trade, but societies need to focus their attention on fostering community-oriented production. Such smaller scale operations are more flexible and adaptable to local demands and environmentally sustainable production methods. They are also more susceptible to democratic control and foster businesses less likely to migrate and more likely to coincide with community interests.

The citizen movements argue that basic services like health and education should be provided as a matter of right, not based on the ability to pay. They want to protect the global commons -- the seas, the atmosphere, shared knowledge -- away from corporate privatization. But there remains a huge role for the marketplace, especially as it involves locally controlled, more democratic, and smaller scale enterprises, as opposed to oligopolistic corporations. The citizen campaigns want to decentralize economic power, which is why land reform is so essential in developing countries; and they want to facilitate citizens joining together into organizations -- like labor unions -- that can offset concentrated corporate power. They want to contain unlimited capital mobility, so that absentee corporations and financial institutions do not maintain the veto power over economic policies exacted by threats from business to leave the jurisdiction unless government capitulates to their demands.

Their emphasis on local economies notwithstanding, the civic movements embrace globalization -- just not the corporate-dominated variety. They seek pull-up agreements, such as human rights treaties that set a fundamental standard for civilized behavior; the tobacco control agreement that requires members to meet minimum requirements to protect health; and the treaties that establish thresholds of environ mental protection -- as opposed to the pull-down model of the WTO and NAFTA.

At stake is the very basis of democracy and accountable decision-making that is the necessary undergirding of any citizen struggle for just distribution of wealth and adequate health, safety, and environmental protections. The corporate alternative is an economic model of supranational limitations on any nation's legal ability to put human well being before commercial activity. Corporate globalization seeks to eliminate democratic accountability over matters as intimate as the safety of our food or the conservation of our land, water, and other resources. This fetishization of profit creates grotesque inequalities and has terrible consequences for planetary ecology.

As economist Herman Daly warned in his January 1994 "Farewell to the World Bank," the push to eliminate the nation-state's capacity to regulate commerce "is to wound fatally the major unit of community capable of carrying out any policies for the common good.... Cosmopolitan globalism weakens national boundaries and the power of national and subnational communities, while strengthening the relative power of transnationa1 corporations."

More and more people are coming to see the triumph of such a perverse corporatist mentality as intolerable. By banding together in existing and new organizations; by forming networks, enterprises, and cooperative ventures; We build momentum for a just world.

[admin]

STAND FOR JUSTICE

Half of democracy is about just showing up -- informed people showing up to vote, to rallies, marches, demonstrations, to give testimony, attend action meetings for schools, to partake in community protection, advance civil rights, improve health care, and work for peace. But most people don't show up, even though it doesn't take all that much time or money and there is no one to stop them. Politicians pander to us with slogans, flatter us for doing nothing about their behavior. Do we need to lull ourselves with shrugging cynicism or other rationalizations for apathy? Too much can go wrong for our country if we don't apply some "tough love" and get our friends and neighbors going. So much goodness, well- being, fulfillment, and foresight are ours for the asking if we dedicate our values in those directions.

Democracy does take some work. Democracy does take a no-excuses attitude, a positive refusal to become discouraged. The reverse option is to continue losing more and more control over most everything that matters to us outside or inside the home. Don't you want to have a voice in the matters that affect the living conditions of you and your family? Injustice hurts and shuts you out. Justice helps and lets you in.

The first step is to decide how much time we're going to devote to what irks us. Here again is a loss of control -- "I just don't know where the time has gone," or "I just don't have the time." We're pulled in all directions by the time-takers -- waiting on the phone for a simple answer; stuck in bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic; taking things to be repaired; negotiating suburban sprawl; ferrying kids and going to appointments; trying to figure out our bills, which seem to be in code; and above all, having to work longer and longer on the job or jobs to pay those bills. Americans work on average longer than French workers who have a shorter work week, longer paid vacations, childcare, paid sick leave, and health insurance.

The good news is that time can be managed and liberated for what we decide is important. You have probably formed some distinct impressions about Congress, enough perhaps to turn you off in dismay or disgust, though you may like your own Representative. You've heard story after story of how many of these politicians -- not all -- grovel to raise campaign cash, called "legalized bribery" by David Brinkley. How many elected officials wallow in cowardliness when they should be standing tall, how many are always alert to raising their pay and expanding their benefits, and perfecting their charming ways of sweet-talking the public? How many push for one-party redistricts? There are 535 members of Congress (435 Representatives and 100 Senators). Only ten or so put their voting record on the web in a clear retrievable fashion. The rest have declined all such requests by voters and citizen groups.

Now suppose one early summer evening, a person knocked on your door and introduced himself this way: "Hi, I'm your new neighbor. Just wanted you to know that I spend over 20 percent of your income, can raise your taxes while lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, can send your children off to war, and can let special commercial interests gouge and harm you and your family. See you later."

What would you do? Express umbrage at his interruption that is preventing you from watching a rerun of Cheers? Or would you say, "Hey, come back here, you mean something to me, so I better mean something to you!" That person is your member of Congress.

Presently, about 1,500 large corporations control or block most of the votes of most members of Congress on very important matters. It is not beyond the realm of realization to look forward to a time when a few million modestly organized Americans, representing the values of much greater numbers of their fellow Americans, turn the national legislature into a Congress of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The most effective way to begin this process is to cut the reins of commercial campaign contributions that presently restrain members of Congress and direct them toward further concentration of greed and power in ever fewer hands. "Campaign finance reform" has to be one of the most dull and yet most important phrases in our language. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that "of all the mischiefs, none is so afflicting and fatal to every honest hope as the corruption of the legislature." Two hundred years later, Senator Robert C. Byrd (Dem-WV) said, "It is Money! Money! Money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics!" All along, a hefty majority of the people have wanted some kind of campaign finance reform and many nonvoters cite the corruption of dirty money in elections as a reason why they do not vote.

Still, the dull phrase is utterly too vague to bring home the intimate and cruel effects on people's lives. As Will Rogers quipped, "Congress is the best money can buy." For years, I've seen the way cash register politics works against you. Hundreds of drug industry lobbyists prowl the halls of Congress. Their industry PACS contribute tens of millions of dollars to key legislators, and you pay higher prices for medicines and medical devices. Your tax dollars fund new drug development that the National Institutes of Health gives away to drug companies, which charge you staggering prices for new medicines they received free. You pay.

HMOs and large hospital chains send checks to Congress and our country continues to be the only western democracy without universal health insurance. Nothing is done by our government about tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries from medical malpractice in hospitals. Little effort is devoted to law enforcement against the looting of Medicare and Medicaid using unscrupulous over-billings and phantom services that total tens of billions of dollars yearly. You pay.

Auto manufacturers and their dealers have locked up with lucre. those members of the House and Senate who block improved auto safety, fuel efficiency and pollution standards. You pay. The oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries spread their dollars around Congress and between the political parties. In return, they deny you solar energy and an energy efficient economy, make you subsidize them with your taxes, get us embroiled in overseas turmoil, and expose you to their continued toxic pollutants. You pay.

The giant military weapons companies work Capitol Hill with a commercial intensity second to none. The result is redundant and immensely wasteful munitions, planes, ships, and missiles, most of which come in way above budget. Your tax dollars subsidize sales of many such weapons to repressive regimes abroad. You can't get community programs -- such as education, clinics, public transit, drinking water upgrades, public libraries -- funded because military budgets are rapacious. You pay. Uncle Sam is turned into one giant corporate welfare paymaster for the Molochs of Big Business. And we pay because we are not organized to have a say for our country's future and a say for our own or our children's well-being.

So the few decide for the many and, not surprisingly, the few put themselves first. Nothing new here. When the people are not organized to transmit and reflect their demands on a regular basis, the organized few prevail. Mass media exposes of the nexus between money, lobbyists, and members of Congress engaged in wrongdoing may produce temporary squirming, but then it is back to normal. For the very people charged with maintaining political law and order are indebted to this dirty money system, and they're not likely to self-prosecute or change the system.

The book End Legalized Bribery by retired member of Congress from Hawaii, Cecil Heftel, has on its cover a picture of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich shaking hands at a "town hall" meeting in New Hampshire on June 11, 1995. At the event, a citizen, Frank MacConnell, asked them if they would form a blue-ribbon panel to produce a plan to reform the nation's campaign finance system. With the national broadcast media looking on, both men quickly agreed. Heftel burnishes the words THEY LIED under the picture, because nothing came of that handclasp. Heftel then devotes a hundred and thirty-five readable pages to laying the basis for his Clean Money Campaign Reform with free access to television and radio time for those ballot qualified candidates who agree to receive public monies, and avoid all private money except small contributions to demonstrate some popular support and serious intent.

This little book offers a galvanizing narration of the outrages corporate lobbyists inflict on regular Americans, conducting what reporters Jeffery Birnbaum and Alan Murray, writing for the Wall Street Journal; called a nightly sale with the members of Congress as the merchandise. As I read it, I recalled previous sterling denunciations of the dirty money system corroding our democratic processes written in the 1980s and 1990s by Elizabeth Drew, Philip Stem, Brooks Jackson, Donald L. Barlett, and James B. Steele. Nonetheless, the money race continued to worsen, with more politicians dialing for the same business dollars with frenzied diligence. When you ask the members of Congress about the monetized life they lead, most express disgust with the "whole rotten system," as one put it. Yet, they are the legislators who can do something major to stop what a congressional staffer called "the rat race of rot and roll."

When corruption is so institutionalized that it becomes a way of life, though sometimes distasteful to its predators (some of whom feel they are being shaken down) and to its practitioners, many voters just shrug their shoulders in resignation and conclude that "the system is rigged." Well, not quite. Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) was elected again and again without asking for any campaign contributions. He would spend a few hundred dollars just for postage to mail back unsolicited donations that dribbled into his campaign office. Of course, it helped that he would literally walk all over the state of Wisconsin, hold more hearings than almost anyone, listen to the people, watchdog government waste, and vote in a progressive manner.

Proxmire is long retired and his example is not around to set the standard of proper behavior that is possible when you represent the people first. Heftel quotes Thomas Paine who wrote, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of right." Certainly, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thinks that money is free speech and that not nearly enough is spent on campaigns. According to McConnell, campaigns should go unregulated except for the stipulation that donations be disclosed. He neglects the fact that money can suppress the speech of those who don't have enough of it even to compete on a level playing field, or to attract more media and respectable poll numbers. These gravitate to those with the most money so that small starts based on character, integrity, and honesty, as Heftel points out, do not have a chance to have a chance. He points out that public financing costing "$6.50 per citizen per year is all it would take to own our democracy." He also notes that "two or three dollars would do the trick for state elections." The present seaminess costs citizens hundreds of billions of dollars a year -- the cost of neglected health, injuries, fraud, crime, and aggravation.

I have always been fascinated by the intense interest and time that people invest in their hobbies. As a youngster, I poured hours into collecting stamps and playing chess. Years later, I wondered why the joys of civic activity are not seen by more people as a kind of hobby. One day I opened the New York Times to read that a bird with a Western European habitat had been sighted in a New Jersey marsh. The exciting news spread to birdwatchers allover the mid-Atlantic region and they responded by getting in their cars, boarding trains, buses, and planes to the Garden State for the rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of their intrepid' feathered friend. What if, I mused in a moment of fantasy, the bird took off, flew south and alighted on the Capital dome of the Congress, pursued by legions of birdwatchers? They might take time to enjoy a brief stint at "Congress watching." Certainly, we need that.

Several hundred Congress Watchers in each congressional district -- well- linked, marshalling the votes, statements, financing, and other activities of their senators and representatives for astute diffusion among the 500,000 or so residents of each congressional district -- would do wonders for responsive politics. Holding vibrant accountability sessions between citizens and their members of Congress, attended by the media, would keep legislators' feet on the ground and their pockets clean. Easy slogans would go out the windows before the probes and proposals of their informed constituents. Participants in this watchdog club could inform their neighbors what a little public investment of their time can produce, how it can replace the private investment of the corporate lobbyists that have turned Congress into a bustling bazaar of giveaways to those who are paying the pipers. Ending what Heftel called a system of campaign finance laws that promotes "begging, bribery, and extortion" will attract much better and more honest candidates for public office who want to get things done and do not want to get their hands dirty by demanding money that carries a quid pro quo. As the grassroots strength of the Congress Watchers increases, you'd see changes in the legislators' record and attentiveness to subjects and directions that the big boys of business do not welcome. Watching the' muscle of the people turn the Congress in their direction would be a lot of fun, an exercise in the politics of joy and justice.

All the above may still not arouse you because it doesn't connect with your temperament. Let me try another approach. Once upon a time there were mothers who lost their children in car crashes due to drunk drivers. One day in 1980, Candace Lightner lost her teenage daughter to a drunk driver. She got mad, real mad. Mad enough, she says, to seek justice and revenge. So she Started MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which took off like a rocket. Nationwide, thousands of other mothers joined her to pass or toughen laws against drunk driving and get them enforced. Mothers who lost their beloved children did not have to be tutored in motivation. They had their unrelenting grief to propel them to action. All over America, relatives of victims swing into action after tragedies stemming from defective products, dozing truck drivers, street crime, contaminated blood, taxies around homes, E-coli contaminated meat.

If you are not driven to action by tragedy, yet another approach is available. Ask yourself what really sparks your indignation among the assortment of injustices you view on television, hear on radio, or read in newspapers and magazines? Let one example make this point. Whether you stood for or against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, compare the way the Bush government treats the men and women on active duty with the way it treats Halliburton and other corporate profiteers from this war. Reservists and National Guard members find that their incomes are lower, some far lower. Lower-rank enlistees need food stamps. Their self-employed businesses are shaky or crumbling in their absence. The National Consumer Law Center reports in its study "In Harm's Way -- at Horne" that "scores of consumer-abusing businesses directly target this country's active-duty military men and women daily." Some in the National Guard are so hard-pressed that they have lost their homes or had their furniture repossessed. Barbara Ehrenreich writes that charities have started to "help families on U.S. military bases, like the church-based Feed the Children, which delivers free food and personal items to families at twelve bases."

Many of the troops in a volunteer army come from the ranks of the working poor. The poor have always fought the wars, starting with George Washington's army. While George W. Bush is busy transferring more wealth to the super rich using tax cuts and corporate welfare, the children of military personnel receive less funding for their base schools. Veterans' disability benefits are subtracted from the military retirement pay of soldiers.

Enraging veterans further, Bush's 2005 budget asks Congress to increase veterans' drug co- payments and institute an "enrollment fee" that veterans' groups believe will drive about 200,000 veterans out of the VA system and discourage many more from enrolling. This is the same shameless chicken hawk, George W. Bush, who frequently takes Air Force One to military bases in the United States to pose with soldiers for one photo opportunity after another to feed to' a compliant media. However, the "pause and run" photo opportunist has refused to go to Dover, Delaware to pay his respects to the returning dead, those who gave their young lives to his illegal, fabricated war in the quicksands and alleys of Iraq. No news photographers or camera teams are allowed at the Dover base by this administration. Old and new veterans are beginning to filter out Bush flattery and flag-waving to cut to the core of what Bush is doing to them in the hard reality of programs and budget cuts while far greater government deficits are registered to reduce taxes for big companies and the rich. How's your dander when you learn about what Bush does in contrast to what he says? Ready to show up?

If you're poor, you may feel too busy dealing every day with your travails to think about showing up. Well, prepare to be poorer every day. Earlier, I mentioned that your minimum wage buys three dollars less (adjusted for inflation) then the minimum wage did in 1968. Sounds like too many poor Americans are falling behind ... every day. Have you heard of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, www.acorn.org ) It is a citizen action group composed of low- and moderate-income people. In November 2000, they issued a report called "Separate and Unequal" on predatory lending in America -- something that was criminal through the 1960s before most of the state usury laws were repealed in the 1970s under pressure from the financial industries.

The world of predatory lending among lower income minorities and poor Whites is little known to the rest of America. Signing on the dotted line of such a fine-print contract is routine for the down and out so that the law itself becomes an instrument of oppression used by the loan sharks. Although the variety of gouging and deception takes different forms depending on the type of case and place involved. ACORN reports about the (often Wall Street-financed) predatory lenders going to work on Mason and Josie, "an elderly African American couple who have excellent credit and whose primary source of income is Mason's veteran's benefits. Their mortgage was at a 7 percent interest rate when a broker convinced them to consolidate some credit cards into the mortgage." The new mortgage for $99,000 carried an interest rate of 8.4 percent and the broker added a second mortgage for $17,000 at an interest rate of 13 percent. The first mortgage built in nearly $6,000 in broker and third-party fees. Both loans included prepayment penalties. Then the broker applied a series of confusing payment schedules so that his customers were not aware that both loans required balloon payments after 15 years. ACORN concludes that "after making monthly payments of nearly $950 over the next fifteen years, Mason and Josie will face a balloon payment for $93,000."

ACORN and other neighborhood groups become more effective when more of the residents in the areas they are defending become active participants. This leads to a central point in civic action. A large percentage of the causes you may decide to advance are already the mission of existing local, state, national, or international nonprofit advocacy organizations that will welcome you with open arms. Their web sites are easy to locate. There are manuals and books on organizing, advocating, and strategies that work. Why reinvent the wheel when your engagement can make existing ones move faster and better?

Sometimes, there are no precursors. The massacre of September 11, 2001, was without precedent and the grief-stricken families of the fallen had to start from scratch to secure an independent investigation. While President Bush focused on the television airwaves toward Afghanistan, the families began organizing to discover what went on in our government that failed to prevent the attacks on that fateful day. Washington officialdom was initially not interested. The White House was, cool to a proposed independent investigative commission. A small number of families, led by four widows, became increasingly persistent and the mass media conveyed their determination. The politicians always have trouble saying NO to the bereaved, which is one reason they do not like to have them testify in Congress. The bereaved speak from their hearts and minds; their only proxies are their conscience and their quest for truth.

For months they knocked on congressional doors, took their case to officials in the executive branch, located outside allies and refused to take NO for an answer. They cited commissions created to investigate previous calamities in American history. Finally, President Bush relented and appointed five Republican and five Democratic members to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The Commission will make its final report at the end of July 2004, after a series of highly publicized public hearings and private sessions in search of the facts and the most effective recommendations. In the audience, carefully monitoring the proceedings, were the families of 9/11, secure in their belief that had they not stood for justice, there would have been no such commission. Our country owes them an immeasurable debt of gratitude.

Now, it is time to hear from the families of other lost sons and daughters, the families of the maimed -- those without legs or arms, the blind and seriously ill, who fill the wards of Walter Reed Army Hospital and other military hospitals. Some of these bereaved Americans hold George W. Bush responsible for an illegal, unnecessary war in Iraq based on fabrications and deceptions. Who can forget seeing the weeping father from Baltimore wailing, "President Bush, you took my only son." A war unlike other wars, launched against the public opposition of retired generals and admirals, former intelligence and diplomatic officials, now free to speak out. A war against the private advice of many inside the CIA, the U.S. Army and the State Department, below the level of Bush's compliant political appointees.

The "glory" of war always precedes its reality. And a war intended to be a political distraction from problems at home, a political chilling of the president's opposition, and a source for oil and gas resources, given to the president's corporate contributors, is particularly rancid and reckless. Such actions are impeachable. Howard Zinn, who was an honorably discharged bombardier in World War II, began thinking about how little is devoted to preventing war and how much blood and treasure are devoted to fighting it on the backs of the GIs who are only ordered but never asked.

Zinn, a historian who taught for many years at Boston University, has chronicled "the betrayal of the very ones sent to kill and die in wars." This year he tells the story of twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Feldbusch, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was blinded when a shell exploded 100 feet away near a dam along the Euphrates River in Iraq. His hometown of Blairsville, Pennsylvania, an old coal mining town of3, 600, gave him a parade. His father, sitting by his bed, said: "Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing." Ruth Aitken lost her son, an Army captain in Iraq a few days after the invasion. Before he disembarked, she called it a war for oil. "He was doing his job," his mother said, "but it makes me mad that this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as something it wasn't." Cowboy Bush's "Bring 'em on" bravado in July 2003, from the comforts of the Oval Office, infuriated many of these families. One mother of a soldier in Iraq told a television reporter "Bring 'em on? Expose more of our soldiers? My son may be next."

With one of the largest rotations of troops to and from Iraq underway, there will be many eyewitness accounts conveyed to millions of Americans in millions of conversations. Many of them will no longer be dazzled by the political abuse of patriotic symbols, nor will they respect exhortations about fighting for freedom, democracy, and security in a faraway tortured land that we now know possessed no imminent threat to the United States or its allies. What they may not appreciate at first is that they possess the most powerful assets to end a quagmire that breeds more terrorists and hatred throughout the impoverished Islamic world. Those assets are their sacrifice and their credibility, having been in the sands and streets and alleys of Iraq. The chicken hawks in and around the White House, who have been proven wrong by their own weapons inspectors, emissaries, and "embedded" reporters, may have the formal power. The soldiers and their families have the moral power. Once aroused, this moral power can overwhelm the political manufacturers of this war and the exploitative corporations that feed avariciously on lucrative wartime contracts.

The soldiers and their families can rescue our nation, its young men and women, and its resources that could be applied here at home. They need only to heed the call of their own authentic patriotism and organize, organize, organize. It could come quickly because they will have no problem securing the media's rapt attention. It cannot come quickly enough, however, for the rounds of casualties, horror, pain, irreversible anguish for both the American and Iraqi peoples are mounting. It cannot come quickly enough to stop the policy boomerangs or, in the CIA word used by Chalmers Johnson, "blowbacks" against the security and other best interests of Our country. Already, in spite of contrary pressures, there are solidarities forming among the parents who lost their children. They are thinking about ways to exercise their freedom to speak their minds and to stand for their country, so grievously betrayed by the arrogance of political rulers in the White House whom a majority of American voters rejected at the polls.

These families, once they take the lead, will be supported by tens of millions of Americans from all backgrounds and counseled by many retired military and diplomatic officials whose dire predictions and warnings before the invasion of Iraq are coming true with appalling consequences. They feared a trap was facing our government in Iraq and a multiple trap of fearsome proportions it has become. Chicken hawks Bush and Cheney sent American soldiers to Iraq, often without key protective equipment and adequate supplies of drinking water. All the while the two bosses were going from one fat-cat multimillion dollar fund raiser to another, selling out our country's political institutions. In the meantime, our soldiers are stuck in a whirlwind of violence, disease, and deprivation in Iraq, with low morale and no exit strategy. A reporter said to a soldier, "What would you ask of your president?" The soldier replied, "I would ask for his resignation."

It takes some doing to turn a world that was demonstrating support for America after 9/11 into a world that is aghast and hostile to the messianic unilateral militarism of George W. Bush and his chronically prevaricating vice president, Dick Cheney -- a man who repeatedly expounds on television what is not the case. He does this so often that he is becoming an object of ridicule inside the Beltway. As one civil servant said, "He makes even Republican eyes roll."

The present Bush regime refuses to listen to knowledgeable and experienced people who fought in wars and' who believe its current policies are endangering the United States and undermining the struggle against stateless terrorism everywhere. We must ask Mr. Bush, "isn't it time for you to learn what these patriotic Americans and the families of the fallen think by meeting with them? You've dodged them long enough, and since you have been wrong and they have been right, you should adopt some of that humility you promised voters in the campaign of 2000."

George W. Bush ran during the 2000 campaign as the "responsibility" candidate. He said again and again before large audiences that individuals should be held responsible for their public policy actions. His counterterrorism advisor in the White House, Richard Clarke, resigned and later appeared on 60 Minutes in March 2004, stating that the Bush administration repeatedly gave the impression that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11. Clarke, a highly regarded long-time civil servant under four presidents, uttered these words: "The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it. They know better. We told them: The CIA told them. The FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking they were avenging September 11, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. I think for a commander-in-chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable." Clarke was speaking for thousands of knowledgeable civil servants and military personnel in the Bush administration who can not speak out.

In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke wrote: "Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new crusaders come to occupy Muslim land."

"Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting, 'Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.''' So wrote Richard Clarke.

Before the National Commission on the September 11 attack, Clarke testified that "By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." Corning from an acknowledged hawk, his words elicited a moment of silence from the panel.

Perhaps it is time for candidate John Kerry to repeat the question that Naval Captain John Kerry put to the Senate Committee in April 1971 when he returned from combat duty in Vietnam: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

The horrors of wars have prompted some of our most celebrated generals to construct broader frames of reference after retirement. Consider the newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous "cross of iron" address in April 1953 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The context for his remarks was the eight years of tension with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and its policy of dominating its neighbors. Eisenhower was searching for a peaceful world beyond what he called "the worst to be feared and the best to be expected." He portrayed the confines of the present world situation this way: "The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth." Then, he provided a contrast which is rarely drawn by our political leaders today, much less the voracious military weapons corporations for which no military budget is ever large enough. Eisenhower's understanding of consequences invites careful attention to his prescient statement a half century ago:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Is there no other way the world may live?

It behooves us to listen more to the post-World War II assessments of some of our leading generals, such as George C. Marshall who advanced the uplifting of living standards in Europe to forestall another monstrous dictatorship. Or Douglas MacArthur, who in 1957 warned Americans about the exaggerations of threats by the U.S. government and its defense industries in order to increase military budgets.

Generals, after they have engaged in bloody battles, sometimes acquire a wisdom not within the reach of chicken hawks who let others fight the wars they supported. Remember Vietnam. What would Eisenhower say today about the massive number of world-destroying weapons in our government stockpile, enough to blow up the planet three hundred times and make the rubble bounce? What would he say about the world's $3 billion a day on military budgets, nearly half by the United States alone, while 50,000 infants and small children die each day in the world from entirely preventable or easily curable diseases?

Unlike revolution, the relentless erosion of peoples' standards of living and of fairness does not proceed with sirens or clarion calls. The very nature of an eroding democratic culture is its insidiousness, its exclusion from the visible indicators of the governing and oligarchic rulers. It comes like Carl Sandburg's fog "on little cat feet":

I'd like to remind George W. Bush about Gandhi's "seven deadly social sins:"

• Politics without principle
• Wealth without work
• Commerce without morality
• Pleasure without conscience
• Education without character
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice

I would add two more:

• Belief without thought
• Respect without self-respect

"We are ready," Eisenhower concluded, "to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world."

It is time to define patriotism as a stand for justice, recalling the ringing final words of the pledge of allegiance: "with liberty and justice for all."

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Appendix

THE CONSCIOUS VOTER

Most politicians use the mass media to obfuscate. Let's face it. Voters who don't do their homework, who don't study records of the politicians, and who can't separate the words from the deeds will easily fall into traps laid by wily politicians.

In the year 2002, Connecticut Governor John Rowland was running for re-election against his Democratic opponent, William Curry. Again and again, the outspent Curry informed the media and the voters about the corruption inside and around the governor's office. At the time, the governor's close associates and ex-associates were under investigation by the U.S. attorney. But to the public, Rowland was all smiles, flooding the television stations with self-serving, manipulative images and slogans. He won handily in November. Within weeks, the U.S. attorney's investigation intensified as they probed the charges Curry had raised. Rowland's approval rating dropped to record lows, and impeachment initiatives are now underway with many demands for his resignation. Curry has gained favor in the public eye, but the election is long past. Enough voters had been flattered, fooled, and flummoxed to cost him the race.

Tom Frank, a Kansas author, recently wrote: "The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000, George W. Bush carried it by a majority of greater than 75 percent." Inattentive voters are vulnerable to voting against their own interests. They are vulnerable to voting for politicians who support big business and ignore their interests as farmers, workers, consumers, patients, and small taxpayers.

Big Business will not spur change in a political system that gives them every advantage. Change must come from the voters, and here's how friends can avoid the three Fs:

• A liberation ritual. Rid yourself of all preconceived, hereditary, ideological, and political straitjackets. Replace with two general yardsticks for candidates for elective office: Are they playing fair and are they doing right?
• Stay open-minded. Avoid jumping to conclusions about a candidate based solely on their stance on your one or two primary issues. Don't disregard where they fall on twenty-five other realities that affect you and your family very deeply and seriously. If you judge them broadly rather than narrowly, you increase your influence by increasing your demands and expectation levels for their performance. There are numerous evaluations of their votes (see Citizen.org or Commoncause.org for progressive perspectives) and positions to get you behind sly slogans like "Clear Skies Initiative" or "Leave No Child Behind."
• Know where you stand. A handy way to contrast your views with those of the incumbents and challengers is to make your own checklist of twenty issues, explain where you stand and then send your list to the candidates. See how their list -- or their actual record -- matches up to your own.
• Ask the tough questions. These are the questions that politicians like to avoid. They include whether they are willing to debate their opponents and how often, why they avoid talking about and doing something about corporate power and its expanding controls over people's lives, or how they plan to shift power from these global corporate supremacists to the people. Ask them to speak of solutions to the major problems confronting our country. Politicians often avoid defining solutions that upset their commercial financiers (this includes a range of issues, such as energy efficiency, lower drug prices, reducing sprawl, safer food, and clean elections). Ask members of Congress to explain why they keep giving themselves annual salary increases and generous benefits, and yet turn cold at doing the same for the minimum wage, health insurance, or pension protections.

All in all, it takes a little work and some time to become a super-voter, impervious to manipulation by politicians who intend to flatter, fool, and flummox. But I dare suggest that this education can also be fun, that the pursuit of justice can offer great benefits to the pursuit of happiness, and that such civic engagement will help Americans today become better ancestors for tomorrow's descendants.

[admin]

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A variety of worthwhile information can be found on the following web site:

http://www.citizen.org
http://www.citizenworks.org
http://www.csrl.org
http://www.cptech.org
http://www.commercialalert.org
http://www.essential.org
http://www.opendebates.org
http://www.nader.org
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org

Recommended magazines and other publications:

The Amicus Journal
Boston Review
Consumer Reports
Harper's Magazine
In These Times
Mother Jones
Multinational Monitor
The Nation
The Progressive
Rachel's Environmental & Health News
The Washington Monthly
The Workbook

The following two publications regularly have numerous feature articles on corporate abuses:

Business Week
Wall Street Journal

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INDEX

ABC Nightly News, 83
ABM Treaty, 229
Adelphia Communications Corp., 165
Advancing Justice Through DNA
Technology Act. 51
Advanta.66
Advertising to Children Accountability
Act, 113
African Growth and Opportunity Act
(AGOA), 10
Africa's Choices (Brown), 251
Against All Enemies (Clarke), 269
Aitken, Chad, 207
Aitken, Ruth, 266
Alcohol industry and children, 104
Alinsky, Saul, 21
Allegheny Airlines, 59
Allison, Bill, 89, 94, 217
Allstate Insurance, 64
American Airlines, 63
American Farm Bureau Federation. 88
American Income Life Insurance
Company, 216
American Prospect, 49-50
America Online, 109
AMTRAK, 215
Andersen, • Warren, 170
Anderson, Ray, 129
Annie E. Casey Foundation, 48
Arafat, Yasir, 229
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM),
159-160
Arthur Andersen. 161, 165, 183-184
Ashcroft, John, 56, 168, 220
Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now (ACORN), 264
Athletic programs for women, 54
AT&T, 72
Aubrey G. Lanston & Co., 164-165

Baggett, Billy, 175
Balance, democracy vs. plutocracy, 3-4
Balanced trade, 252
Bank of America Securities, 167
Bank Holding Company Act, 163
Barbour, Haley, 165
Barbour, William H., Jr., 165
Barlett, Donald L., 259
Bass, Kenneth C., III, 178
Baucus, Max, 242
Bear Stearns, 167
Belnick, Mark, 166
Bennett, Bob, 179
Berry, Father Thomas, 112
Bethlehem Steel, 143
Biirnbaum, Jeffery, 259
Bil Mar Foods, 181
Bingham, Eula, 152
bin Laden, Osama, 226-227, 270
Bittner, Ronald L., 150
Bleeding the Patient- The Consequences
of Corporate Health Care
(Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and
Hellander), 209
Block, Jerry, 178
Blowback, 114, 267
defined, 232
Blowback (Johnson), 232
Blumenthal, Richard, 72, 82
Boehringer Ingelheim, 243
Bonds, Judy, 122
Brady, M. Jane, 171
Braithwaite, John, 177, 186
Breuer, Lanny, 181
Brinkley, David, 256
Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, 73, 243
British American Tobacco (BAT), 1~5
Bronfenbrenner, Kate, 144-145
Brown, Franklin, 166
Brown, Hank, 203
Brown, Michael, 126
Brown, Michael Barratt, 251
Buffett, Warren, 89, 163, 198, 216
Buffkin, Sherri, 146
Bush, George H. W., 202
Bush, George W., 15, 16, 25, 37, 56, 57,
139, 220, 222, 269, 272, 273
and tax cuts, 72, 215-217
Bush's Brain (Slater and Moore), 41
Business lobby and power, 60
Butler, Smedley, 224-225
Byrd, Robert, 121, 257

Cade, Mike, 153
Cade, Ted, 153
California Nurses Association (CNA),
151
Campaign finance reform, 257
Capital/credit, 12-14
Capital gains tax, 92
Capitalistic system, assumptions of,
192-193
Cargill, 12
Carpenter, Dr. David, 127
Carr, Donald, 178
Carter, Jimmy, 7, 29, 87
Cato Institute, 177
Channel One, 107
Chapela, Ignacio, 135
Cheating of America, The (Lewis and
Allison), 89, 217
Cheney, Richard, 30, 99, 268
Chevron, 160, 247
Child Harm Disclosure Act, 113
Childhood, commercializing, 108
Child Privacy Act, 113
Children:
commercializing, 105-107
drug companies, 103
exploitation of, 100-102
obesity, 103-104
over medicating, 103-104
soft drink companies, 104
television, 102-103, 104-105
tobacco and alcohol industries, 104
video games, 104
Children's Advertising Subsidy
Revocation Act, 114
Children's Food Labeling Act, 113
CIBC World Markets, 167
Citigroup, 12
Citizens Coal Council, 122
Civic motivation:
building, 6
lack of, 1
Civiletti, Benjamin, 178
Civil justice system, 37
Civil liberties, attacks on, 56-58
Clark, Wesley, 15, 219, 221
Clarke, Richard, 269-270
Clean Air Act, The, 117, 236
Clean Money Campaign Reform, 259
Clean Water Act, 119, 121-122, 125
Clinton, Bill, 25, 30, 91, 202, 259
Codex Alimentarius, 237-238
Coehlo, Tony, 27
Coke, 12
Cole, David, 224
Coleman Company, 44
Collins, Chuck, 216
Commercial Alert, 112-113
Commercial-Free Schools Act, 113
Commercialism, 73
and children, 105-107
and dreams of profits, 115
Computerized billing fraud, 67
Congress Watchers, 261
Consequences of HMOs. suffering the,
208-210
Consumer control, loss of, 74
Consumers:
skilled, 76
smart, 76
smarter, better markets, 60-67
Contributions, cutting the reins of,
257
Cooper Industries, 44
Corning, 43
Corporate:
barrage, 100-105
capitalism, controlling, 9-10
crime, 159-185
cost of, 168-171
crack down of, 185-189
globalization, 13
homicide, 171-175
socialism; 193
Corporate Crime Reporter, 159
Cost, corporate crime, 168-171
Court, Jamie, 207. 208
Covington & Burling, 181, 183
Criminals, corporate, 159
Curnutt, Jerry, 94
Curry, William, 273

Daly, Herman, 197, 252, 253
Davenport, Charles, 89
Davidson, James Dale, 91
Davis, Jeffrey, 171
Death tax, 92
Delta Airlines, 63
Democracy gap, 1-2
Deregulation, 161
Dillon, Warren, 143
Disclosure, 39
Discovery, 38
abuse of, 39, 40
Disease, 11-12
DNA testing, 51
Doe Run Company, 123-124
Dole, Elizabeth, 154
Dole, Robert, 30
Donahue, Phil, 62
firing by MSNBC, 223
Dorgan, Byron, 242
Dow Chemical, 43, 170, 175
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, 167
Drew, Elizabeth, 259
Drucker, Peter, 176-177
Drug companies and the medicalization
of children, 103-109
Duopoly, two-party, 24, 25

Easterbrook, Frank, 176
Ebber, Bernard, 166
Economics Policy Institute (EPI), 18,
147
E. F. Schumacher Society, 111-112
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 263
1872 Mining Act, 85
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 15
"cross of iron" address, 270, 272
Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA), 55
Employment Retirement Income
Security Act (ERISA), 65
Empty-stomach feeling; 6
Endangered Species Act, The, 117
End Legalized Bribery (Heftel), 259
Enron Corp., 165, 149, 192
and the destruction of documents,
183-184
Environment, 10-11, 117-135
Equal Pay Act, 53
Equilon, 153
Ernst & Young, 44, 242
Estate tax, 88, 92
Estes, Ralph, 169
Ethyl Corp., 175, 239
Exploitation of children, 100-102
Export-Import Bank, 12
Exxon, 169-170, 197
Exxon-Mobil, 247
Exxon Valdez spill, 41, 169-170, 197

Fairness Doctrine for Parents Act, 113
False Claims Act, 179, 185
Fedders, John, 184-185
Federal discovery rule, 38
Feinstein, Diane, 208
Feldbusch, Jeremy, 266
Fellmeth, Robert C., 18, 110
Firestone, 170
Fischel, Daniel, 176
Ford Motor Company, 64, 90, 172
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 180
Foreign policy, 219:-233
Fortress America (Grieder), 233
Foster, Andrew, 165
Fox, John O., 217
Framework Convention on Tobacco
Control, 250
Frank, Barney, 54
Frank, Tom, 273
Fraud:
control, under-investment of, 67-72
health care, 168
savings and loan, 169
Friedman, Milton, 176
Friedman; Thomas, 229
Fritts, Eddie, 31
Frontier, 150-151
Fuller, Buckminster, 230

Gandhi's seven deadly social sins, 272
Gap, The, 249
Garfield, Bob, 101
Gates, Bill, Jr., 19, 89
Gates, Bill, Sr., 89 216
General Electric, 241
General Electric (GE) Credit, 66, 84,
199
General Mining Act of 1872, 128
General Motors (GM), 7, 61, 64, 87, 90,
170, 207
Gerbner, George, 100
Gingrich, Newt, 259
Giuliani, Rudolph, 161
Glass-Steagall law, 162, 163
GlaxoSmithKline, 243
Glickman, Dan, 130
Global corporate model, 10
Global Crossing, 151
Globalization:
confronting, 248-253
corporate, 142, 235-253
and its effects, 199
ravages of, 240-248
Goldman Sachs, 167
Good Jobs First, 49-50
Goodrich, .David, 207-208
Goodrich, Teresa, 208
Goodwin, Richard N., 203
Gourley, Coulin, 46
Grameen Bank, 251
Grant, James, 230
Grass, Martin, 166
Grassley, Charles. 82
Great Food Gamble, The (Humphreys),
106
Greenspan, Alan, 3, 194, 190, 194, 197
Grieder, William, 233
Griles, Steven, 119
Grossman, Dave, 105
Grove, Andrew, 84

Halliburton, 242, 262
Harkin, Tom, 237
Hart, Philip, 74
Hawken, Paul, 120
Health care, 149
fraud, 67, 268
Health Maintenance Organizations
(HMOs), 205-209, 248
HealthSouth Corp., 166
Heftel, Cecil, 259-263
Hellander, Dr. Ida, 209
Helmsley, Leona, 81
Helvarg, David, 132
Heyman, Philip, 224
Himmelstein; Dr. David, 209
HIV/AIDS drug cocktails, 243
Honeywell Corporation, 126
Houghton, Amory, 95
Humanitarian yardsticks, 194-199
Humphreys, John, 106
Hunger, 12
Huron Consulting Group, 164
Hussein, Saddam, 269

Imbalances, growing, 199-204
Inequalities, persistent, 52-56
Inheritance tax, 92
Innocence Project, and DNA testing, 50
Insurance industry, and dishonesty
campaign, 44-46
Intel Corporation, 84, 86
Interface Corporation, 129
International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions, 146
International Monetary Fund (I MF), 10,
232-233, 245-246, 250
International trade agreements, 201
Investment, military vs. civilian,
213-215
IRS, mistreatment by, 81

Jackson, Brooks, 259
Jacobson, Michael F., 75, 109
Jeffress, Charles, 153
Jenner & Block, 181
Johnson, Chalmers, 232, 267
Johnson, Lyndon, 7
Johnston, David Cay, 92, 94, 150, 217
Judas Economy, The (Wolman), 95
Jurassic Park, 101

Kay, David, 212, 223
Keith, Damon, 231
Kelleher, Herbert, 63
Kerry, john, 270
Kids and Social Action (Lewis), 100
Kimbrell, Andrew, 111
King Coal, 121-122
Kinsley, Michael, 219
Kopper, Michael, 165
Kozlowski, L. Dennis, 166

Labor movement, 139-158
Landscape, razing the, 118-123
Law, corporate attack on, 160-162
Leave Children Alone Act, 113
Leave No Child Behind (LNCB), 114
Legalized bribery, 256
Lehman Brothers, 167
Leitzell, Terry, 178
Lerach, William, 161
Lerner, Michael, 228
Lethal arms trafficking, 11
Levitt, Arthur, 162
Lewis, Barbara A., 99
Lewis, Charles, 89, 94, 217
Lewis. Peter, 38
License to Steal: Why Fraud Plagues
America's Health Care System
(Sparrow), 67, 168
Liebeck, Stella, 42-43
Lieberman, Joseph, 30
Lightner, Candace, 262
Limbaugh, Rush, 17
Liquor industry, 71
L.L. Bean, 215
Lobby, corporate crime, 175-182
Lobbyists, 257
Loomis, Carol, 163-164
Lott, Trent, 31
Lovins, Amory and Hunter, 120
Luntz, Frank, 92
Lurie, Peter, 154

MacArthur, Douglas, 271
MacConnell, Frank, 259
Making a Killing: HMOs and the Threat
to Your Health (Court), 207
Malpractice awards, 45-46
Marketing madness, 75
Marketing Madness (Jacobson and
Mazur), 75, 109
Marriott, 86
Marshall, George C., 271
Martinez, Mel, 66
Massey Energy Company, 121
Mastercard, 64
Maytag, 241
Mazur, Laurie Ann, 75, 109
Mazzocchi, Tony, 8, 158
McArthur, Douglas, 15, 221
McCain, John, 30
McConnell, Mitch, 260
McDonald's, 86
coffee spill case, 42-43
McGovern, George, 93
MCI, 166
MCI WorldCom, 72
McWane, Inc., 172-173
Medical malpractice, 69
Meier, Deborah, 115
Melman, Seymour, 213-215
Merck, 243
Merrill Lynch, 167
Methauex, 238-239
Micro-credit, 251 ,
Microsoft, 87, 89, 199
Microsoft Windows, 64
Milken, Michael, 161
Miller & Chevalier, 180
Mobil Oil, 248
Monks, Robert, 3, 192, 194
Monsanto Corporation, 43, 127,
135-136
Moore, Jim, -41
Moore, John Norton, 178
Morris, Jim, 49; 175
Moscowitz, Norman, 178
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
(MADD), 262
Motiva Enterprises, 171
Mountain-top removal, 121-123
Moyer, Homer, Jr., 180
Moyers, Bill, 174, 175
MSNBC, 199, 221
Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI), 249
Multinational corporation, 191
Murray, Alan, 259

NAFTA, 235-238, 251
Chapter 11, 245, 248-250
Nairn, Allan, 115
National Environmental Policy Act, The,
117
National Forest Protection Alliance, 129
National Health Program (NHP), 209,
211
National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health, 151
Natural Capitalism (Hawken and
Lovins), 120
Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), 125
NBC, 84
Needleman, Herbert, 108
Nightline, 227
Nike, 249
9/11 Commission, 231
Niskanen, William, 177
Nixon, Richard, 7, 26, 32
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), 10

Obesity and children, 103-104
Occidental Petroleum, 250
Occupational Safety and Health Act,
151-152
Occupational Safety and Health Agency
(OSHA), 151
penalties, 154
Office for Civil Rights (OCR), 54
Oil revenue, 247-248
Olsen, Kathy, 208
Olsen, Steven, 37, 208
O'Me1veny & Myers, 180
Owen, Dr. Penny, 115
Oxman, Bernard. 178

Parents' Bill of Rights, 112-114
Parker. Jeffrey, 176
Patriot Act, 56, 224
Penrose, Boies, 25, 29
Pensions, 149-151
People's Airlines, 62
Pepsi, 12
Perfectly Legal: The Covet Campaign to
Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the
Super Rich and Cheat Everybody
Else (Johnston), 92, 150, 217
Peterson, LaTasha, 146
Pew Oceans Commission, 131
Pfizer, 160
Philip Morris, 71, 244
Phillips, John T., 173-174
Pitt. Harvey, 162, 184
Pittson Coal, 121
Plunder, corporate and financial, 248
Plutocracy, 91-92
Political system, change, 274-275
Postel, Theodore, 215
Powder River Basin, example, 118-119
Powell, Lewis, 26
Power, shifts of, 27-29
Powerlessness:
feeling of, 4-5
and high drug costs, 73
Priorities and institutional insanity,
205-217
Prisons, privatization of, 50
"Prisons for profit, " 49
Prison system, 47-51
Private Securities Litigation Reform Act,
161
Product Placement Disclosure Act, 113
Progressive Insurance Company, 38
Prospectus for the Cultural Environment
Movement (Gerbner), 100
Providian Financial Corp., 182
Proxmire, William, 260
Prudential Securities, 167
Puloskie, John Patrick, Jr., 150-151

Quest, 72
Quist, David, 135

Rabin, Yitzhak, 228
Racial profiling, 47-48
Raphaelson, Ira, 180
Rapoport, Bernard, 216
RCA, 84
Reagan, Ronald, 27, 74, 92
Regulation, 72
Regulatory rollbacks, 125
Reign of ETS, The (Naim), 114-115
Renco Group, Inc., 124
Rennert, Ira, 124
Reno, Janet, 48
Responsible wealth, 216
Rey, Mark, 131
Richards, Ann, 41
Richardson, Eliot, 178
Rite Aid, 166
Robbins, Ira, 174
Robertson, Reuben, 59
Rochester Telephone Company, 150-151
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 4
Rosenfeld, Dr. Arthur, 120
Ross, Dan, 174-175
Ross, Elaine, 175
Rossotti, Charles O., 81, 95
Rove, Karl, 41
Rowland, John, 273
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, 178, 179
Royal Dutch Shell, 171
Rumsfeld, Donald, 15, 30
Ruskin, Gary, 114

Safe Drinking Water Act, 128
Safeway, 149
Sales, salvage timber, 130
Salomon Smith Barney, 167
Sara Lee Corporation, 181
Sarbanes Oxley law, 185
Sarid, Yossi, 228
Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 247
Saudi Aramco. 171
Saul, John Raulston, 110
Savings and investment tax, 92
Savings and loan fraud, 169-170
Schmeiser, Percy; 135-136
School, a new Byrd, 97-100
Schultz, Brian, 98-100
Schumacher, E. F., 12, 195
Schwarzer, William, 38
SCPIE Holdings Inc., 45
Scrushy, Richard, 166
Sears, 64
Security, national, 14-21
Shadid, Dr. Michael, 205
Sheck, Barry, 51
Shell, 247
60 Minutes, 70, 127, 269
Slater, Wayne, 41
Small Is Beautiful, 12
Smith, Sam, 35
Smith, Wesley J., 74
Smithfield Foods, 145-146
Soled, Jay, 89
Solitron Devices, Inc., 126
Soros, George, 89, 216
Southwest Airlines, 63
Sovereign Individual, The (Davidson), 91
Sparrow, Malcolm, 67-68, 268
Spielberg, Steven, 101
Spitzer, Eliot, 167
Sprint, 72
Standard Oil, 170
Stanley Works, 82
Starr, Judson, 178
State Farm Insurance, 64
Steele, James B., 259
Stern, Philip, 259
Stein, Gertrude, 33
Stephenson, Diana, 241
Stewart, Martha, 167
Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill
(Grossman), 105
Sullivan, Scott, 166
Surgeon General's report, 70
Swartz, Mark, 166

Tampa Electric, 125
Tax:
avoidance, 90-96
escapes, offshore, 82
evasion, 90-91
havens, 82-83
incentives, 86-87
obligations, acceptance of, 80
schemes, 82-83
Taxes, 79-80
Taxpayer Appreciation Day, 83-86
Television and children, 102-103,
104-105
10 Tax Questions the Candidates Don't
Want You to Ask (Fox), 217
Terry, Dr. Luther, 70
Texaco, 247
Textron, 43
Third World and corporate globalization,
242
HIV/AIDS, 243-244
oil revenue, 247-248
plunder, 248
smoking, 244-245
structural adjustments, 245-246
Third-party payment, 67
Thompson, Larry, 182-183, 186
Thornburgh, Dick, 169
Timber harvesting, 129-132
Title IX and women in athletics, 54
Tobacco industry, 11, 244-245
and children, 104
manipulation of public, 69-70
Tort reform, 20, 40, 43
Total Information Awareness Program
(TIPS), 57
Toyota, 64
Trade, importance of, 252
Trani, John M., 82
Trans Circuit, Inc., 126
Tribe, Lawrence, 202
Truth in advertising laws, 2
20120, 70
Tyco, 166
Tyranny, 11

Unconscious Civilization, The (Saul),
110
UNICEF, 12, 230
Union Carbide, 170, 175
Unions, 144-149
United Airlines, 63
United Electrical Workers, 157
United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW), 145-147
United Parcel Service (UPS), 239
Duocal, 247
Upjohn, 43
U.S. National Academy of Sciences
(NAS), 133

Vacco, Dennis C., 172
Values, civil vs. commercial, 3
Valukas, Anton, 181
Video games, violence and children, 104
Vinegrad, Alan, 183
Visa, 64
Volcker, Paul, 216
Voter, the conscious, 273-275

Wage inequality, 53-54
Wages, 140-144
reasons for stagnation, 142-144
Wagner, Frank, 172, 173
Wal-Mart, 18, 64, 74-75
and fight against unions, 146-147, 149
Wallach, Lori, 237
War Is a Racket (Butler), 225
War on terrorism, 56, 220-221
Warner-Lambert, 160
Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why
America Should Tax Accumulated
Fortunes (Collins), 216
Weekley, Jim, 122
Weinberg, Neil, 164
Weiss, Martin D., 167
Weissman, Robert, 13-14
Weiss Ratings, 167
Wellstone, Paul, 82
Whirlpool, 241
Whitman, Christie Todd, 199
Whose Trade Organization? (Wallach and
Woodall), 237
Winning the Insurance Game (Nader and
Smith), 74
Winthrop & Stimson, 178
Witte, Anne, 33
Wolfe, Sidney, 154
Wolff, Edward, 19
Wolman, William, 95
Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse
of Power (Witte), 33
Woodall, Patrick, 237
Woolhandler, Dr. Steffie, 209
Workplaces and safety, 151-155
progress in, 155-158
World Bank, 10, 244-246, 250
World Health Organization (WHO),
112, 231
World Tourism Organization, 249
World Trade Organization (WTO), 10,
235-238, 243, 249, 250
WorldCom, 164, 165, 166, 193
Worldwatch Institute, 134

Zinn, Howard, 266
Zuk, Donald J., 45