Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Lexington Herald-Leader | 08/01/2005 | An inside track: prison jobs
Lexington Herald-Leader | 08/01/2005 | An inside track: prison jobs
BG: Wonder if they have Escort Services.....
BG: Wonder if they have Escort Services.....
Suburban Guerrilla � Blog Archive � Conscience
Suburban Guerrilla � Blog Archive � Conscience
"We should take a moment, however this debate turns out, to applaud the effort by three Republican senators to stand up to the White House and insist that the United States not just fight harder than its enemies"
"We should take a moment, however this debate turns out, to applaud the effort by three Republican senators to stand up to the White House and insist that the United States not just fight harder than its enemies"
Articles, government corruption, freedom of speech, truth
Articles, government corruption, freedom of speech, truth: "FBI Confiscates Personal Property Of Former U.S. Army Corporal Who Blew Whistle On 1976 Government funded 'Perfect Terrorist Plan' To Topple Twin Towers"
Endless Terror as the Global Model for Transformation
Another Day in the Empire: "
Endless Terror as the Global Model for Transformation"
Endless Terror as the Global Model for Transformation"
The Mystery of The Secret Man
"
The Mystery of The Secret Man
On July 15, the daily Publisher's Lunch e-mail offered a startling piece of nonfiction sales news: "Another recent big release, Bob Woodward's THE SECRET MAN, is reported to have moved 17,900 copies in its opening week on sale, following an announced first printing of 850,000 copies and a laydown of somewhat less than that."The relatively uninspiring number raised a few eyebrows in publishing circles. The 850,000 hardcover print run for Woodward's memoir about Deep Throat had suggested a certain confidence on the part of Simon & Schuster--conjuring images of a mad rush on bookstores as for a Clinton memoir or Harry Potter installment. Woodward's history should have given reason for optimism: At least 12 previous Woodward books have made the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover; the least successful of them spent 11 weeks on the chart, as reported by the Times Book Review.
...."
Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out - Sunday Times - Times Online
Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out - Sunday Times - Times Online
BG: Hit Tip to www.orlingrabbe.com ("MI5, Mossad play games with their al Qaeda websites")
BG: Hit Tip to www.orlingrabbe.com ("MI5, Mossad play games with their al Qaeda websites")
How the Intelligence and Facts Were Fixed
The Huffington Post | The Blog: "How the Intelligence and Facts Were Fixed"
The Old Media is Dead, Long Live the New Media
The Huffington Post | The Blog: "The Old Media is Dead, Long Live the New Media"
Roberts’ Support Of Biased Policies Unearthed…
The Huffington Post | Latest News: "Roberts� Support Of Biased Policies Unearthed� "
Monday, August 01, 2005
Evil Stem Cell Research Proving Annoyingly Useful
AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: "
Evil Stem Cell Research Proving Annoyingly Useful "
Evil Stem Cell Research Proving Annoyingly Useful "
BBC NEWS | Americas | Bolton appointed US envoy to UN
BBC NEWS | Americas | Bolton appointed US envoy to UN
BG: ... staying calm. I don't gain any peace, harmony, or health feeling rage at the BUSH Admin.
BG: ... staying calm. I don't gain any peace, harmony, or health feeling rage at the BUSH Admin.
The Common Ills: Other stories of note in this morning's New York Times
The Common Ills: Other stories of note in this morning's New York Times
The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq's uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase.
The officer, an employee at the agency for more than 20 years, including several years in a clandestine unit assigned to gather intelligence related to illicit weapons, was fired in 2004.
The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq's uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase.
The officer, an employee at the agency for more than 20 years, including several years in a clandestine unit assigned to gather intelligence related to illicit weapons, was fired in 2004.
The Becker-Posner Blog: Islamist Violence and Immigration Policy--Posner
The Becker-Posner Blog: Islamist Violence and Immigration Policy--Posner
"read in conjunction with the economist-columnist Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times"
"read in conjunction with the economist-columnist Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times"
SEX AND THE SUPREMES
The New Yorker: PRINTABLES
SEX AND THE SUPREMES
by JEFFREY TOOBIN
Why the Court’s next big battle may be about gay rights.
Issue of 2005-08-01
Posted 2005-07-25
There have been occasions in the history of the Supreme Court when simple professional excellence, more than any grittier consideration, was enough to propel a lawyer onto the bench. Ethnic and geographic balance, as well as a measure of ideological suitability, played some part in, say, Herbert Hoover’s selection of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, in 1932, or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s choice of John M. Harlan, in 1955, but it was possible, too, to see these nominations as ratifications of a national consensus about lawyerly credentials. George W. Bush’s designation of John G. Roberts, Jr., can be seen as following this tradition. Though he is only fifty years old, Roberts, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, has been a clerk to two eminent judges (the late Henry J. Friendly, of the United States Court of Appeals in New York, and William Rehnquist, Roberts’s likely future colleague), a lawyer in the Reagan White House, Principal Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush, and a leading private lawyer before the Justices. Since 2003, he has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
But the transformation of the politics surrounding the Court suggests another, less noble reason for the President’s choice. Roberts’s shimmering résumé reveals everything except what really matters when one considers the potential impact of a Justice. More than ever before, the Supreme Court has become the national arbiter of cultural issues, and the last years of the Rehnquist Court have been characterized by a moderate consensus that has largely reflected the centrist views of the Justice whom Roberts would replace, Sandra Day O’Connor. On these issues Roberts has said little. When he was Deputy Solicitor General for the first President Bush, he argued for overturning Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. Yet in written responses during the confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit, in 2003, he said, “I do not believe that it is proper to infer a lawyer’s personal views from the positions that lawyer may advocate on behalf of a client in litigation.” He also described Roe as “binding precedent,” although a Supreme Court Justice is far less bound by precedent than any lower-court judge.
In light of his argument against Roe, and because he was nominated by Bush, many reproductive-rights groups have rushed to condemn Roberts. For the same reasons, many conservatives have embraced him. According to Jay Sekulow, who runs the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, which was founded by the televangelist and onetime Presidential candidate Pat Robertson, “The President said he wanted a Justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas”—Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—“and I think that’s what he’s got with John Roberts.” But Roberts’s paper trail, which is more extensive than is generally believed, suggests a more cautious assessment. His own words appear to support the view, expressed by many who know him, that he does not hold strong political beliefs. “I know one of the things that frustrates very much the judges who are on [the D.C. Circuit], all of whom are very hardworking,” he said in his 2003 confirmation hearings, “is when they announce a decision and they’re identified in the press as a Democratic appointee or a Republican appointee.” And, Roberts added, “all of a sudden the report is, well, they just decided that way because of politics.”
Roberts believes in the concept of judicial restraint. In a recent opinion in the D.C. Circuit, he chided his conservative brethren in a case about the regulation of raw materials used in making drugs, admonishing them, in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s words, “to observe the wise limitations on our function and to confine ourselves to deciding only what is necessary to the disposition of the immediate case.” In an answer to the senators about his judicial role models, he wrote, “I admire the judicial restraint of Holmes and Brandeis, the intellectual rigor of Frankfurter, the common sense and pragmatism of Jackson, the vision of John Marshall.” The question, then, is how this potpourri of influences will translate into his opinions on the Court at a time when, like any Justice, he will be defined by his views on such issues as abortion, church-state controversies, and gay rights—an especially inflammatory issue in recent years.
The Supreme Court last considered a gay-rights issue in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, when the Justices ruled, six to three, that the state could not criminalize sodomy between two consenting males. The Justices then issued duelling prophecies about the meaning of their decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority amounted to a sustained plea for equal rights for homosexuals, who “are entitled to respect for their private lives.” But Kennedy asserted that his opinion addressed only the issue before the Court, and did not, for example, presage an endorsement of gay marriage. This disclaimer drew a characteristically biting rejoinder from Scalia in his dissent: “Do not believe it.” Rather, Scalia insisted, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When the Supreme Court reconvenes, in October, presumably with a Justice Roberts in the junior seat, the Court will return to the “homosexual agenda.”
The upcoming case reflects the curious state of the contemporary gay-rights movement. In some respects, and in some places, especially within the legal profession itself, the cause of gay rights has never been stronger. As Scalia noted with dismay in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence, the Association of American Law Schools “(to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct.” At the same time, anti-gay-rights forces have continued to gain strength. After most law schools refused to help military recruiters on their campuses under the policy denounced by Scalia, Congress took another tack. They passed a law saying that if a law school persisted in limiting recruiting by the armed forces, the school would lose federal funding. It is the constitutionality of this law, which is known as the Solomon Amendment, that the Court will decide this fall.
As Supreme Court doctrines go, gay rights is a relatively new one, especially compared with decisions on race and gender. Systematic legal efforts on behalf of gays began only in the nineteen-seventies, and the Justices didn’t address the issue in a substantive way until the eighties. But that is changing. In May, a federal district judge in Nebraska struck down a recent amendment to that state’s constitution which banned gay marriage and civil unions; an appeal of that ruling is pending. The Court will almost certainly be asked to decide whether gay marriages in Massachusetts must be honored by other states. The Solomon Amendment case will be an important clue about which side has the upper hand.
The series of events leading to the Supreme Court argument on the Solomon Amendment began about forty years ago, with the arrival of Sylvia Law in New York City. Law, who grew up in Bozeman, Montana, won a National Merit Scholarship, which took her, in the early sixties, to Antioch College. “Antioch made you take a job during college, and I got one at the Ethical Culture Society,” she said recently. “I got off the train, and I was an instant New Yorker. I wanted to be a civil-rights organizer, and I applied to core and the N.A.A.C.P., but all they wanted to know was how fast I could type. I’m a good typist, but a better organizer. So I got a job as a ward clerk at St. Luke’s Hospital, for minimum wage, and soon enough I realized I had to get out. I had to have a better credential, so I went to New York University Law School.” After graduating in 1968, she spent a few years as a lawyer in the national welfare-rights movement, and then, in 1973, she was invited to teach law at N.Y.U., as one of the first two women to join the faculty.
Now sixty-three, Law has a spray of disorderly blond hair and the weary smile that comes from waging a generation’s worth of political fights, many of them unsuccessful. In her academic life, Law helped to pioneer the field of health law, studying such varied subjects as malpractice and assisted suicide, and she is now the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry. She has kept up as a litigator, too, spending a decade on the losing battle to persuade the courts to recognize a constitutional right to government-funded abortions for poor women. Around the school’s Greenwich Village campus, Law may be best known as the unofficial godmother to progressive students and their causes.
“N.Y.U. has an extraordinary and unique role in American legal education,” Law said recently in her office, which is decorated with samples from her collection of homemade quilts. “We’ve been ahead of everyone in welcoming women and blacks to law schools and to the profession.” In the late seventies, Law noticed an anomaly in the school’s recruitment policy. “We had tons of great gay students, and, among feminists like me, it was obvious to us that gay rights was the next civil-rights movement,” she said. So, in 1977, at the instigation of Law and others, the faculty voted overwhelmingly to bar employers who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from using the law school’s placement office. N.Y.U. was the first law school in the country to add such a provision to its recruiting policy, which did not apply to the rest of the university. Harvard, Yale, and Stanford followed.
The race and gender provisions of the recruiting policies had an immediate effect on both the law school and the firms that recruited there. Burt Neuborne, a well-known civil-rights litigator and another longtime professor at N.Y.U., said, “When Sylvia and I started teaching here, in the early seventies, we still had firms that told us up front that they wouldn’t hire blacks. They said the same thing about women. We decided we simply wouldn’t allow our facilities to perpetuate that kind of discrimination. And what we did worked magnificently. The law firms simply changed their policies, virtually overnight.”
At the same time that liberal law professors were advancing the gay-rights agenda on campus, like-minded lawyers were trying to do the same in the courts. They made it to the Supreme Court in 1986, but the Court’s first major gay-rights decision was a tremendous disappointment. In Bowers v. Hardwick, a dismissive opinion by Justice Byron White, for a five-to-four majority, held that the State of Georgia could prosecute individuals for engaging in consensual homosexual sodomy; White wrote that the gay defendant’s claim “is, at best, facetious.” Perhaps the most revealing cultural marker in the case was that the swing vote, Justice Lewis Powell, told one of his clerks at the time that he had never met a gay person. In fact, according to Powell’s biographer John C. Jeffries, Jr., that clerk was gay. (Powell, who died in 1998, later said that he regretted his vote in Bowers.)
Still, the setback in the Supreme Court didn’t stop the momentum behind gay rights. In 1990, the Association of American Law Schools approved the rule that offended Scalia—requiring prospective recruiters on their campuses to “observe the principles of equal opportunity.” The following year, Bill Clinton, early in his campaign for President, said that he favored allowing gays to serve in the military. “It seemed to me elemental that if a person, a man or a woman, wanted to serve their country they ought to be able to do it,” he said in a speech in Los Angeles. The promise drew relatively little attention during the campaign, but when Clinton reiterated it shortly after his inauguration it turned into a political fiasco; the issue dominated his first days in office in a way that the new Administration had never anticipated. On January 25, 1993, “at their urgent request,” as Clinton recalled in his memoir, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with him to announce their unanimous objection to lifting the ban on gays. Congressional opposition, led by Sam Nunn, at that time the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was just as strong. Facing certain defeat, Clinton told his Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, to come up with a compromise, and on July 19th the President announced the policy that became known as “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The new approach theoretically allowed gays and lesbians to remain in the military, but only if they could convince their superiors that they were celibate. “I got the worst of both worlds,” Clinton later wrote—losing the fight to allow gays in the military and earning taunts of betrayal from his gay supporters.
Law schools, though, showed no intention of backing down on gay rights. In 1993, the N.Y.U. faculty went so far as to ban all Colorado law firms from on-campus recruiting, to protest the state’s passage of Amendment 2, which repealed state laws that offered protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and forbade the future passage of any such laws. (The faculty rescinded the ban after the Supreme Court struck down Amendment 2, in 1996.) And “Don’t ask, don’t tell” made the law professors more determined to keep military recruiters off campus.
The campus protests against “Don’t ask, don’t tell” were noticed by the congressmen who had already embarrassed Clinton on the issue. “I had a group of kids from my district who were going to Sacramento State, and they were worried that they were going to lose their R.O.T.C. scholarships, because the university was throwing the R.O.T.C. off campus,” Richard Pombo, a Republican congressman from California, recalled. “So I called an official at the school. He was very abrupt. He said, I don’t like the military policy and I don’t like the military, and there is nothing you can do about it. It became very adversarial, and I came back to the office and started talking about what we could do about it.”
Pombo has a goatee that, by congressional standards, is rakish; he looks younger than his forty-four years, but he’s a veteran legislator, now serving his seventh term in a sprawling district that includes the Central Valley, east of San Francisco. Like many Western congressmen, Pombo wears cowboy boots to work in the Capitol, and he often wears a cowboy hat, too, especially when he’s being photographed. Early in his congressional career, Pombo focussed mostly on agricultural and resource issues, but the stand of the universities led him to join Gerald Solomon, a Republican congressman from upstate New York, and propose a law that would test the strength of the academics’ convictions. In a speech on the floor of the House in 1994, Pombo said that the universities who received money from the federal government “need to know that their starry-eyed idealism comes with a price.” (Solomon died in 2001.)
The political trajectory of the Solomon Amendment tracked the ascendant path of social conservatives generally. The first version of the law, which passed in 1994, directed the Department of Defense to withhold funds from any school that restricted military recruitment. As a consequence, N.Y.U. Law School gave up seventy-five thousand dollars in federal funds. But later the law changed, so that if only one part of a university limited recruitment by the military, the entire university would forfeit federal funding. For N.Y.U., that meant a hundred and thirty million dollars, mostly for medical research. Bill Carr, the Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy, explains the government’s rationale this way: “It’s called the ‘volunteer’ military, but it’s really a ‘recruited’ military. Walk-ins are only about five per cent of our needs. We have to go out and find the other ninety-five per cent, and anything that gets in the way of clear and open talk compromises our effort. That’s why we support the Solomon Amendment, because if we want to tell our story to people, and there is a censoring of our message, then our costs of doing business rise. We’re a federal agency obeying federal law about gays in the military, and we shouldn’t be penalized for it, especially in wartime.”
Faced with the potential loss of all federal funds, university presidents, like John Sexton, of N.Y.U., began instructing their law schools to readmit military recruiters. On September 19, 2002, Sexton wrote to Richard Revesz, the dean of the law school, saying that the university stood with the law school in opposing discrimination against gays, but the cost of a stand on principle was simply too high. “Given the consequence of what was at stake, I don’t think the university had much choice but to comply,” Revesz said. “We let the military recruiters come back on campus but also decided to use every legal means at our disposal to challenge the law.” Sylvia Law, along with professors and students at several law schools, filed a federal suit arguing that the Solomon Amendment violates the schools’ First Amendment rights to protest against discrimination on sexual orientation.
Like many fights over cultural issues, this one was provoked largely by core activists: it’s more the liberal law professoriat, rather than the law students, on one side, and conservative politicians, rather than the military as a whole, on the other. Even the main gay law students’ association at N.Y.U. left the lead protest role to a fledgling campus group that called itself Straights and Queers United Against Discrimination, or squad. “No one else wanted to make waves,” Richard McKewen, a member of the N.Y.U. Law School Class of 2001 and a founder of squad, said. “So, when the administration caved and let the military back on campus, some of us signed up for interviews and decided to confront the recruiters.” On the first day, about a hundred students chanted on the sidewalk, “Don’t ask, don’t tell. Military go to hell.” As for McKewen, he recalled, “Someone gave me a tiara and a feather boa. I tried to talk to the recruiter about how she was complicit in the discriminatory policy, but she pretty quickly cut off that conversation.” McKewen is now an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission, in Washington.
By the time Law and others filed their suit, which is known as Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (fair) v. Rumsfeld, the gay-rights movement was doing better in the courts than in the political arena. In 2003, the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision on homosexual sodomy explicitly reversed the seventeen-year-old ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. Scalia’s warning—that Lawrence would lead to a right to gay marriage—was at least partially vindicated the following year, when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts relied heavily on Lawrence in allowing gays to marry there. Gay-rights forces won another victory on November 29, 2004, when a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled, two to one, that the Solomon Amendment violated the universities’ rights to protest against the military.
In Congress, though, support for the law has only grown. On February 2, 2005, in response to the Third Circuit’s ruling, the House voted 327-84 in favor of a resolution reiterating support for the Solomon Amendment. “The gut reaction with members is, Don’t mess with the military,” Pombo said. “It hasn’t been a big partisan issue, except for people who are really out of touch.” On May 2nd, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of the Third Circuit’s decision in fair v. Rumsfeld, and it will be argued on November 29th, very likely before a Court that will include John Roberts.
In his judicial writing, Roberts avoids legalese; he recently implored, “Give me English words over Latin maxims.” His opinions so far have borne out his suggestion to the Judiciary Committee, in 2003, that he was not, in effect, a Scalia-style ideologue. “I do not believe that beginning with an all-encompassing, categorical judicial philosophy or uniform approach to constitutional questions is the best way of faithfully construing the Constitution,” he wrote. “Different approaches may be better suited to different constitutional provisions.” Most of the current Justices follow this more ad-hoc philosophy, and, because the Court does not always take a head-on approach to the issues before it, there are sometimes less predictable voting patterns among the Justices. For example, the Court’s ruling in the medical-marijuana case, in June, did not directly address the propriety of such treatment, only the question of whether the power to regulate it belonged to the federal government or the states. In that case, the Justices’ views on federal power apparently trumped any feelings they might have about medical marijuana itself; so the more liberal members of the Court (plus Scalia) ruled in favor of federal supremacy, while Rehnquist, Thomas, and the ardently pro-states’-rights O’Connor said that the states should have the right to legalize the practice.
Even though the fair case is rooted in the law schools’ attempt to address discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the case is not, strictly speaking, about gay rights. It is, rather, a First Amendment case, about whether the Solomon Amendment impinges on the right to freedom of speech at universities, and whether the government has the right to use the leverage of federal aid to insist that the military be treated like other employers.
In fact, the precise legal issue in the case is surprisingly difficult to identify, and often the trick for Supreme Court litigators is how to define the question in the most advantageous terms. A successful example of this kind of intellectual sorcery came in a series of cases in the nineteen-nineties, when Jay Sekulow engineered a change in the law of religious expression in public places. Previously, the Court had struck down most such public displays in places like schools and government buildings, as a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment; the Court found that such conduct breached the wall between church and state. Sekulow argued that these cases weren’t really about the establishment clause at all but, rather, about freedom of speech; he convinced the Court that students who wished to use school facilities for prayer groups were the victims of government censorship. “The first thing you always have to do is frame the issue, and I took a lot of heat from people on my side, who thought I was abandoning the religion clauses of the First Amendment,” Sekulow said. “But I wanted to win the case.”
The lawyers on both sides of fair are trying to slot their case into a category that works best for their side. For some of the plaintiffs, the government is acting as a malevolent censor. “Government can’t give you a little bit of money and then tell the whole university how to run,” Kathleen M. Sullivan, a professor and former dean at Stanford Law School, who is preparing an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, says. “Government can’t have that much leverage. If we lose this case, there is nothing to stop the government from saying it will take away all federal funds if a university engages in stem-cell research, or gives birth control to its students, or performs abortions in its hospital.”
In the Third Circuit decision, Judge Thomas L. Ambro, writing for the majority, saw the case as an infringement on the law schools’ collective right to freedom of speech. He did so on the basis of a curious analogy. In 2000, the Supreme Court held that the State of New Jersey could not force the Boy Scouts to accept an openly gay man as an Assistant Scoutmaster. To do so, the Justices held, would have violated the Scouts’ rights to free speech under the First Amendment, specifically their desire not “to promote homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.” According to Ambro, “Just as the Boy Scouts believed that ‘homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath,’ the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to justice and fairness.” To allow the military to recruit on campus like other potential employers, the Judge wrote, the universities “must propagate, accommodate and subsidize the military’s expressive message.” Under the First Amendment, he concluded, the recruiting by the military amounted to “compelled speech,” which the government could not force the universities to undertake. As E. Joshua Rosenkranz, the New York lawyer who represents Sylvia Law and the other plaintiffs, says, “The military is saying to the universities, ‘We will come onto your campus. We will discriminate against your students. And you will help us do it.’ ”
The fair case also tests the murky concept of freedom of association. To the plaintiffs, the case is about universities deciding for themselves with whom they want to associate on their own campuses. But that freedom has a limit, especially when federal funds are involved. “The Court has said that there is expressive content, an ideological view, to the Boy Scouts, and even in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston, so the government can’t force the people who run the Scouts, or the people who run the parade, to associate with people they don’t want to associate with,” Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, who was Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, says. “But neither the Scouts nor the parade organizers were taking federal money. When a group takes money from the government, the government is allowed to attach strings. And allowing military recruiters is a perfectly appropriate string.” (Roberts appears likely to share this view, which cannot be good news for the plaintiffs in the fair case. Last year, he joined an opinion in the D.C. Circuit which held that Congress could attach certain conditions to the funding of the Washington subway system. And in his written answers to the Judiciary Committee two years ago, he expressed some skepticism about the argument that strings attached to federal funding could amount to undue coercion on the states, referring to the “heavy burden one advancing such a claim would bear.”)
As the government sees it, the fair case is not about free speech or association but, rather, about the right of the federal government to control how taxpayers’ money is spent. The federal government attaches strings all the time. Money to states for highways can be conditional on road-safety standards and a drinking age of twenty-one; grants to universities come with the strictures of Title VI and Title IX, which require equal treatment of students by race and gender. “By allowing the military to recruit at their law school, the schools are not in any way making any statement or associating with any statement by the military,” Fried says.
The theme of the government’s brief in the case, which was filed last week, is equality: the amendment simply puts the government on a level playing field with other potential employers. “Educational institutions covered by the Solomon Amendment have not been compelled to do anything,” the brief states. “They have voluntarily chosen to accept federal funding on the condition that they provide military recruiters with equal access to their students and campuses. Institutions that do not wish to provide equal access to military recruiters may decline federal assistance.”
Most observers regard the legal arguments of both sides in fair as at least plausible, but most of the current Justices would probably want to defer to the needs of the military. Roberts’s history suggests that he would do the same; the concept of judicial restraint means a reluctance to invalidate the actions of the other branches of government. In its brief, the Justice Department plays up this part of the case, asserting, for example, that the government must have the right to resist “conduct that undermines the military’s recruitment effort, particularly in a time of War.” Even if the plaintiffs lose decisively, fair should probably be regarded as a skirmish in a wider war.
In the era of the Warren Court, in the nineteen-sixties, the concept of judicial restraint was largely associated with the political right—with resisting judicial interference in the governance of sovereign states. In recent years, though, the political right has tried to use the courts to push its own agenda. If a newly constituted Court establishes an abiding commitment to judicial restraint, the right as well as the left is likely to suffer disappointments. Two years ago, in his Senate testimony, Roberts said, “My clients and their positions are liberal and conservative across the board.” He was speaking, of course, about his work as an advocate, not his future as a final arbiter of the nation’s laws.
SEX AND THE SUPREMES
by JEFFREY TOOBIN
Why the Court’s next big battle may be about gay rights.
Issue of 2005-08-01
Posted 2005-07-25
There have been occasions in the history of the Supreme Court when simple professional excellence, more than any grittier consideration, was enough to propel a lawyer onto the bench. Ethnic and geographic balance, as well as a measure of ideological suitability, played some part in, say, Herbert Hoover’s selection of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, in 1932, or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s choice of John M. Harlan, in 1955, but it was possible, too, to see these nominations as ratifications of a national consensus about lawyerly credentials. George W. Bush’s designation of John G. Roberts, Jr., can be seen as following this tradition. Though he is only fifty years old, Roberts, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, has been a clerk to two eminent judges (the late Henry J. Friendly, of the United States Court of Appeals in New York, and William Rehnquist, Roberts’s likely future colleague), a lawyer in the Reagan White House, Principal Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush, and a leading private lawyer before the Justices. Since 2003, he has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
But the transformation of the politics surrounding the Court suggests another, less noble reason for the President’s choice. Roberts’s shimmering résumé reveals everything except what really matters when one considers the potential impact of a Justice. More than ever before, the Supreme Court has become the national arbiter of cultural issues, and the last years of the Rehnquist Court have been characterized by a moderate consensus that has largely reflected the centrist views of the Justice whom Roberts would replace, Sandra Day O’Connor. On these issues Roberts has said little. When he was Deputy Solicitor General for the first President Bush, he argued for overturning Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. Yet in written responses during the confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit, in 2003, he said, “I do not believe that it is proper to infer a lawyer’s personal views from the positions that lawyer may advocate on behalf of a client in litigation.” He also described Roe as “binding precedent,” although a Supreme Court Justice is far less bound by precedent than any lower-court judge.
In light of his argument against Roe, and because he was nominated by Bush, many reproductive-rights groups have rushed to condemn Roberts. For the same reasons, many conservatives have embraced him. According to Jay Sekulow, who runs the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, which was founded by the televangelist and onetime Presidential candidate Pat Robertson, “The President said he wanted a Justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas”—Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—“and I think that’s what he’s got with John Roberts.” But Roberts’s paper trail, which is more extensive than is generally believed, suggests a more cautious assessment. His own words appear to support the view, expressed by many who know him, that he does not hold strong political beliefs. “I know one of the things that frustrates very much the judges who are on [the D.C. Circuit], all of whom are very hardworking,” he said in his 2003 confirmation hearings, “is when they announce a decision and they’re identified in the press as a Democratic appointee or a Republican appointee.” And, Roberts added, “all of a sudden the report is, well, they just decided that way because of politics.”
Roberts believes in the concept of judicial restraint. In a recent opinion in the D.C. Circuit, he chided his conservative brethren in a case about the regulation of raw materials used in making drugs, admonishing them, in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s words, “to observe the wise limitations on our function and to confine ourselves to deciding only what is necessary to the disposition of the immediate case.” In an answer to the senators about his judicial role models, he wrote, “I admire the judicial restraint of Holmes and Brandeis, the intellectual rigor of Frankfurter, the common sense and pragmatism of Jackson, the vision of John Marshall.” The question, then, is how this potpourri of influences will translate into his opinions on the Court at a time when, like any Justice, he will be defined by his views on such issues as abortion, church-state controversies, and gay rights—an especially inflammatory issue in recent years.
The Supreme Court last considered a gay-rights issue in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, when the Justices ruled, six to three, that the state could not criminalize sodomy between two consenting males. The Justices then issued duelling prophecies about the meaning of their decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority amounted to a sustained plea for equal rights for homosexuals, who “are entitled to respect for their private lives.” But Kennedy asserted that his opinion addressed only the issue before the Court, and did not, for example, presage an endorsement of gay marriage. This disclaimer drew a characteristically biting rejoinder from Scalia in his dissent: “Do not believe it.” Rather, Scalia insisted, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When the Supreme Court reconvenes, in October, presumably with a Justice Roberts in the junior seat, the Court will return to the “homosexual agenda.”
The upcoming case reflects the curious state of the contemporary gay-rights movement. In some respects, and in some places, especially within the legal profession itself, the cause of gay rights has never been stronger. As Scalia noted with dismay in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence, the Association of American Law Schools “(to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct.” At the same time, anti-gay-rights forces have continued to gain strength. After most law schools refused to help military recruiters on their campuses under the policy denounced by Scalia, Congress took another tack. They passed a law saying that if a law school persisted in limiting recruiting by the armed forces, the school would lose federal funding. It is the constitutionality of this law, which is known as the Solomon Amendment, that the Court will decide this fall.
As Supreme Court doctrines go, gay rights is a relatively new one, especially compared with decisions on race and gender. Systematic legal efforts on behalf of gays began only in the nineteen-seventies, and the Justices didn’t address the issue in a substantive way until the eighties. But that is changing. In May, a federal district judge in Nebraska struck down a recent amendment to that state’s constitution which banned gay marriage and civil unions; an appeal of that ruling is pending. The Court will almost certainly be asked to decide whether gay marriages in Massachusetts must be honored by other states. The Solomon Amendment case will be an important clue about which side has the upper hand.
The series of events leading to the Supreme Court argument on the Solomon Amendment began about forty years ago, with the arrival of Sylvia Law in New York City. Law, who grew up in Bozeman, Montana, won a National Merit Scholarship, which took her, in the early sixties, to Antioch College. “Antioch made you take a job during college, and I got one at the Ethical Culture Society,” she said recently. “I got off the train, and I was an instant New Yorker. I wanted to be a civil-rights organizer, and I applied to core and the N.A.A.C.P., but all they wanted to know was how fast I could type. I’m a good typist, but a better organizer. So I got a job as a ward clerk at St. Luke’s Hospital, for minimum wage, and soon enough I realized I had to get out. I had to have a better credential, so I went to New York University Law School.” After graduating in 1968, she spent a few years as a lawyer in the national welfare-rights movement, and then, in 1973, she was invited to teach law at N.Y.U., as one of the first two women to join the faculty.
Now sixty-three, Law has a spray of disorderly blond hair and the weary smile that comes from waging a generation’s worth of political fights, many of them unsuccessful. In her academic life, Law helped to pioneer the field of health law, studying such varied subjects as malpractice and assisted suicide, and she is now the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry. She has kept up as a litigator, too, spending a decade on the losing battle to persuade the courts to recognize a constitutional right to government-funded abortions for poor women. Around the school’s Greenwich Village campus, Law may be best known as the unofficial godmother to progressive students and their causes.
“N.Y.U. has an extraordinary and unique role in American legal education,” Law said recently in her office, which is decorated with samples from her collection of homemade quilts. “We’ve been ahead of everyone in welcoming women and blacks to law schools and to the profession.” In the late seventies, Law noticed an anomaly in the school’s recruitment policy. “We had tons of great gay students, and, among feminists like me, it was obvious to us that gay rights was the next civil-rights movement,” she said. So, in 1977, at the instigation of Law and others, the faculty voted overwhelmingly to bar employers who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from using the law school’s placement office. N.Y.U. was the first law school in the country to add such a provision to its recruiting policy, which did not apply to the rest of the university. Harvard, Yale, and Stanford followed.
The race and gender provisions of the recruiting policies had an immediate effect on both the law school and the firms that recruited there. Burt Neuborne, a well-known civil-rights litigator and another longtime professor at N.Y.U., said, “When Sylvia and I started teaching here, in the early seventies, we still had firms that told us up front that they wouldn’t hire blacks. They said the same thing about women. We decided we simply wouldn’t allow our facilities to perpetuate that kind of discrimination. And what we did worked magnificently. The law firms simply changed their policies, virtually overnight.”
At the same time that liberal law professors were advancing the gay-rights agenda on campus, like-minded lawyers were trying to do the same in the courts. They made it to the Supreme Court in 1986, but the Court’s first major gay-rights decision was a tremendous disappointment. In Bowers v. Hardwick, a dismissive opinion by Justice Byron White, for a five-to-four majority, held that the State of Georgia could prosecute individuals for engaging in consensual homosexual sodomy; White wrote that the gay defendant’s claim “is, at best, facetious.” Perhaps the most revealing cultural marker in the case was that the swing vote, Justice Lewis Powell, told one of his clerks at the time that he had never met a gay person. In fact, according to Powell’s biographer John C. Jeffries, Jr., that clerk was gay. (Powell, who died in 1998, later said that he regretted his vote in Bowers.)
Still, the setback in the Supreme Court didn’t stop the momentum behind gay rights. In 1990, the Association of American Law Schools approved the rule that offended Scalia—requiring prospective recruiters on their campuses to “observe the principles of equal opportunity.” The following year, Bill Clinton, early in his campaign for President, said that he favored allowing gays to serve in the military. “It seemed to me elemental that if a person, a man or a woman, wanted to serve their country they ought to be able to do it,” he said in a speech in Los Angeles. The promise drew relatively little attention during the campaign, but when Clinton reiterated it shortly after his inauguration it turned into a political fiasco; the issue dominated his first days in office in a way that the new Administration had never anticipated. On January 25, 1993, “at their urgent request,” as Clinton recalled in his memoir, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with him to announce their unanimous objection to lifting the ban on gays. Congressional opposition, led by Sam Nunn, at that time the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was just as strong. Facing certain defeat, Clinton told his Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, to come up with a compromise, and on July 19th the President announced the policy that became known as “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The new approach theoretically allowed gays and lesbians to remain in the military, but only if they could convince their superiors that they were celibate. “I got the worst of both worlds,” Clinton later wrote—losing the fight to allow gays in the military and earning taunts of betrayal from his gay supporters.
Law schools, though, showed no intention of backing down on gay rights. In 1993, the N.Y.U. faculty went so far as to ban all Colorado law firms from on-campus recruiting, to protest the state’s passage of Amendment 2, which repealed state laws that offered protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and forbade the future passage of any such laws. (The faculty rescinded the ban after the Supreme Court struck down Amendment 2, in 1996.) And “Don’t ask, don’t tell” made the law professors more determined to keep military recruiters off campus.
The campus protests against “Don’t ask, don’t tell” were noticed by the congressmen who had already embarrassed Clinton on the issue. “I had a group of kids from my district who were going to Sacramento State, and they were worried that they were going to lose their R.O.T.C. scholarships, because the university was throwing the R.O.T.C. off campus,” Richard Pombo, a Republican congressman from California, recalled. “So I called an official at the school. He was very abrupt. He said, I don’t like the military policy and I don’t like the military, and there is nothing you can do about it. It became very adversarial, and I came back to the office and started talking about what we could do about it.”
Pombo has a goatee that, by congressional standards, is rakish; he looks younger than his forty-four years, but he’s a veteran legislator, now serving his seventh term in a sprawling district that includes the Central Valley, east of San Francisco. Like many Western congressmen, Pombo wears cowboy boots to work in the Capitol, and he often wears a cowboy hat, too, especially when he’s being photographed. Early in his congressional career, Pombo focussed mostly on agricultural and resource issues, but the stand of the universities led him to join Gerald Solomon, a Republican congressman from upstate New York, and propose a law that would test the strength of the academics’ convictions. In a speech on the floor of the House in 1994, Pombo said that the universities who received money from the federal government “need to know that their starry-eyed idealism comes with a price.” (Solomon died in 2001.)
The political trajectory of the Solomon Amendment tracked the ascendant path of social conservatives generally. The first version of the law, which passed in 1994, directed the Department of Defense to withhold funds from any school that restricted military recruitment. As a consequence, N.Y.U. Law School gave up seventy-five thousand dollars in federal funds. But later the law changed, so that if only one part of a university limited recruitment by the military, the entire university would forfeit federal funding. For N.Y.U., that meant a hundred and thirty million dollars, mostly for medical research. Bill Carr, the Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy, explains the government’s rationale this way: “It’s called the ‘volunteer’ military, but it’s really a ‘recruited’ military. Walk-ins are only about five per cent of our needs. We have to go out and find the other ninety-five per cent, and anything that gets in the way of clear and open talk compromises our effort. That’s why we support the Solomon Amendment, because if we want to tell our story to people, and there is a censoring of our message, then our costs of doing business rise. We’re a federal agency obeying federal law about gays in the military, and we shouldn’t be penalized for it, especially in wartime.”
Faced with the potential loss of all federal funds, university presidents, like John Sexton, of N.Y.U., began instructing their law schools to readmit military recruiters. On September 19, 2002, Sexton wrote to Richard Revesz, the dean of the law school, saying that the university stood with the law school in opposing discrimination against gays, but the cost of a stand on principle was simply too high. “Given the consequence of what was at stake, I don’t think the university had much choice but to comply,” Revesz said. “We let the military recruiters come back on campus but also decided to use every legal means at our disposal to challenge the law.” Sylvia Law, along with professors and students at several law schools, filed a federal suit arguing that the Solomon Amendment violates the schools’ First Amendment rights to protest against discrimination on sexual orientation.
Like many fights over cultural issues, this one was provoked largely by core activists: it’s more the liberal law professoriat, rather than the law students, on one side, and conservative politicians, rather than the military as a whole, on the other. Even the main gay law students’ association at N.Y.U. left the lead protest role to a fledgling campus group that called itself Straights and Queers United Against Discrimination, or squad. “No one else wanted to make waves,” Richard McKewen, a member of the N.Y.U. Law School Class of 2001 and a founder of squad, said. “So, when the administration caved and let the military back on campus, some of us signed up for interviews and decided to confront the recruiters.” On the first day, about a hundred students chanted on the sidewalk, “Don’t ask, don’t tell. Military go to hell.” As for McKewen, he recalled, “Someone gave me a tiara and a feather boa. I tried to talk to the recruiter about how she was complicit in the discriminatory policy, but she pretty quickly cut off that conversation.” McKewen is now an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission, in Washington.
By the time Law and others filed their suit, which is known as Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (fair) v. Rumsfeld, the gay-rights movement was doing better in the courts than in the political arena. In 2003, the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision on homosexual sodomy explicitly reversed the seventeen-year-old ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. Scalia’s warning—that Lawrence would lead to a right to gay marriage—was at least partially vindicated the following year, when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts relied heavily on Lawrence in allowing gays to marry there. Gay-rights forces won another victory on November 29, 2004, when a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled, two to one, that the Solomon Amendment violated the universities’ rights to protest against the military.
In Congress, though, support for the law has only grown. On February 2, 2005, in response to the Third Circuit’s ruling, the House voted 327-84 in favor of a resolution reiterating support for the Solomon Amendment. “The gut reaction with members is, Don’t mess with the military,” Pombo said. “It hasn’t been a big partisan issue, except for people who are really out of touch.” On May 2nd, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of the Third Circuit’s decision in fair v. Rumsfeld, and it will be argued on November 29th, very likely before a Court that will include John Roberts.
In his judicial writing, Roberts avoids legalese; he recently implored, “Give me English words over Latin maxims.” His opinions so far have borne out his suggestion to the Judiciary Committee, in 2003, that he was not, in effect, a Scalia-style ideologue. “I do not believe that beginning with an all-encompassing, categorical judicial philosophy or uniform approach to constitutional questions is the best way of faithfully construing the Constitution,” he wrote. “Different approaches may be better suited to different constitutional provisions.” Most of the current Justices follow this more ad-hoc philosophy, and, because the Court does not always take a head-on approach to the issues before it, there are sometimes less predictable voting patterns among the Justices. For example, the Court’s ruling in the medical-marijuana case, in June, did not directly address the propriety of such treatment, only the question of whether the power to regulate it belonged to the federal government or the states. In that case, the Justices’ views on federal power apparently trumped any feelings they might have about medical marijuana itself; so the more liberal members of the Court (plus Scalia) ruled in favor of federal supremacy, while Rehnquist, Thomas, and the ardently pro-states’-rights O’Connor said that the states should have the right to legalize the practice.
Even though the fair case is rooted in the law schools’ attempt to address discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the case is not, strictly speaking, about gay rights. It is, rather, a First Amendment case, about whether the Solomon Amendment impinges on the right to freedom of speech at universities, and whether the government has the right to use the leverage of federal aid to insist that the military be treated like other employers.
In fact, the precise legal issue in the case is surprisingly difficult to identify, and often the trick for Supreme Court litigators is how to define the question in the most advantageous terms. A successful example of this kind of intellectual sorcery came in a series of cases in the nineteen-nineties, when Jay Sekulow engineered a change in the law of religious expression in public places. Previously, the Court had struck down most such public displays in places like schools and government buildings, as a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment; the Court found that such conduct breached the wall between church and state. Sekulow argued that these cases weren’t really about the establishment clause at all but, rather, about freedom of speech; he convinced the Court that students who wished to use school facilities for prayer groups were the victims of government censorship. “The first thing you always have to do is frame the issue, and I took a lot of heat from people on my side, who thought I was abandoning the religion clauses of the First Amendment,” Sekulow said. “But I wanted to win the case.”
The lawyers on both sides of fair are trying to slot their case into a category that works best for their side. For some of the plaintiffs, the government is acting as a malevolent censor. “Government can’t give you a little bit of money and then tell the whole university how to run,” Kathleen M. Sullivan, a professor and former dean at Stanford Law School, who is preparing an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, says. “Government can’t have that much leverage. If we lose this case, there is nothing to stop the government from saying it will take away all federal funds if a university engages in stem-cell research, or gives birth control to its students, or performs abortions in its hospital.”
In the Third Circuit decision, Judge Thomas L. Ambro, writing for the majority, saw the case as an infringement on the law schools’ collective right to freedom of speech. He did so on the basis of a curious analogy. In 2000, the Supreme Court held that the State of New Jersey could not force the Boy Scouts to accept an openly gay man as an Assistant Scoutmaster. To do so, the Justices held, would have violated the Scouts’ rights to free speech under the First Amendment, specifically their desire not “to promote homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.” According to Ambro, “Just as the Boy Scouts believed that ‘homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath,’ the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to justice and fairness.” To allow the military to recruit on campus like other potential employers, the Judge wrote, the universities “must propagate, accommodate and subsidize the military’s expressive message.” Under the First Amendment, he concluded, the recruiting by the military amounted to “compelled speech,” which the government could not force the universities to undertake. As E. Joshua Rosenkranz, the New York lawyer who represents Sylvia Law and the other plaintiffs, says, “The military is saying to the universities, ‘We will come onto your campus. We will discriminate against your students. And you will help us do it.’ ”
The fair case also tests the murky concept of freedom of association. To the plaintiffs, the case is about universities deciding for themselves with whom they want to associate on their own campuses. But that freedom has a limit, especially when federal funds are involved. “The Court has said that there is expressive content, an ideological view, to the Boy Scouts, and even in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston, so the government can’t force the people who run the Scouts, or the people who run the parade, to associate with people they don’t want to associate with,” Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, who was Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, says. “But neither the Scouts nor the parade organizers were taking federal money. When a group takes money from the government, the government is allowed to attach strings. And allowing military recruiters is a perfectly appropriate string.” (Roberts appears likely to share this view, which cannot be good news for the plaintiffs in the fair case. Last year, he joined an opinion in the D.C. Circuit which held that Congress could attach certain conditions to the funding of the Washington subway system. And in his written answers to the Judiciary Committee two years ago, he expressed some skepticism about the argument that strings attached to federal funding could amount to undue coercion on the states, referring to the “heavy burden one advancing such a claim would bear.”)
As the government sees it, the fair case is not about free speech or association but, rather, about the right of the federal government to control how taxpayers’ money is spent. The federal government attaches strings all the time. Money to states for highways can be conditional on road-safety standards and a drinking age of twenty-one; grants to universities come with the strictures of Title VI and Title IX, which require equal treatment of students by race and gender. “By allowing the military to recruit at their law school, the schools are not in any way making any statement or associating with any statement by the military,” Fried says.
The theme of the government’s brief in the case, which was filed last week, is equality: the amendment simply puts the government on a level playing field with other potential employers. “Educational institutions covered by the Solomon Amendment have not been compelled to do anything,” the brief states. “They have voluntarily chosen to accept federal funding on the condition that they provide military recruiters with equal access to their students and campuses. Institutions that do not wish to provide equal access to military recruiters may decline federal assistance.”
Most observers regard the legal arguments of both sides in fair as at least plausible, but most of the current Justices would probably want to defer to the needs of the military. Roberts’s history suggests that he would do the same; the concept of judicial restraint means a reluctance to invalidate the actions of the other branches of government. In its brief, the Justice Department plays up this part of the case, asserting, for example, that the government must have the right to resist “conduct that undermines the military’s recruitment effort, particularly in a time of War.” Even if the plaintiffs lose decisively, fair should probably be regarded as a skirmish in a wider war.
In the era of the Warren Court, in the nineteen-sixties, the concept of judicial restraint was largely associated with the political right—with resisting judicial interference in the governance of sovereign states. In recent years, though, the political right has tried to use the courts to push its own agenda. If a newly constituted Court establishes an abiding commitment to judicial restraint, the right as well as the left is likely to suffer disappointments. Two years ago, in his Senate testimony, Roberts said, “My clients and their positions are liberal and conservative across the board.” He was speaking, of course, about his work as an advocate, not his future as a final arbiter of the nation’s laws.
Triumph of the Machine - New York Times
Triumph of the Machine - New York Times The New York Times
August 1, 2005
Triumph of the Machine
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The campaign for Social Security privatization has degenerated into farce. The "global war on terrorism" has been downgraded to the "global struggle against violent extremism" (pronounced gee-save), which is just embarrassing. Baghdad is a nightmare, Basra is a militia-run theocracy, and officials are talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq next year (just in time for the U.S. midterm elections).
On the other hand, the administration is crowing about its success in passing the long-stalled energy bill, the highway bill and Cafta, the free-trade agreement with Central America. So is the Bush agenda stalled, or is it progressing?
The answer is that the administration is getting nowhere on its grand policy agenda. But it never took policy, as opposed to politics, very seriously anyway. The agenda it has always taken with utmost seriousness - consolidating one-party rule, and rewarding its friends - is moving forward quite nicely.
One of President Bush's great political talents is his ability to convince people who do care passionately about policy that he is one of them. Foreign-policy neoconservatives believe he shares their vision of a world transformed by American power. Economic conservatives believe he shares their dedication to dismantling the welfare state.
But a serious effort either to transform the world or to dismantle the welfare state would require sacrifices Mr. Bush hasn't been willing to make.
On the foreign policy front, the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emption and unilateralism sounded very impressive at first. But Mr. Bush's tough-guy attitude wasn't matched by his willingness to commit resources. His administration sought global dominance on the cheap, with an undermanned, underplanned invasion of Iraq that has, indeed, transformed the balance of power in the Middle East - in favor of Iran.
On the domestic policy front, talk of an "ownership society" appealed to conservatives who dreamed of rolling back the New Deal. But Mr. Bush has expanded, not reduced, middle-class entitlements. Only the poor and powerless have faced cuts. (I don't think those middle-class entitlements should be cut. But Mr. Bush claims to be against big government.)
Social Security privatization was to the crusade against the welfare state what the invasion of Iraq was to G-Save: an attempt to achieve radical goals on the cheap. Rather than openly propose reductions in entitlement spending, the administration tried to sell a phaseout of traditional Social Security benefits in return for the magic of investing. But the public didn't buy it.
So what about those legislative successes? Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, called the victories "verification that this is a governing party." But governing means more than handing out goodies.
Let's start with the energy bill. Even the bill's supporters barely pretend that it will do anything to reduce America's dependence on imported oil. It's simply an exercise in corporate welfare, full of subsidies and targeted tax breaks.
Then there's the pork-stuffed highway bill. I guess we'll have to stop making fun of Japanese public works spending: now America, too, is building bridges to islands that have almost no inhabitants, but lie in the districts of influential legislators.
Finally, Cafta contains "free trade" in its title, but that's misleading. The administration rammed the bill through the House by, among other things, promising to limit imports of clothing from China; over all, the effect may well be to reduce, not increase, international trade. But pharmaceutical companies got measures that protect and extend their monopoly rights in Central America.
These bills don't have anything to do with governing, if governing means trying to achieve actual policy goals like energy independence or expanded trade. They're just machine politics at work, favors granted in return for favors received.
In fact, you can argue that the administration does a bad job at governing in part because its highest priority is always to reward its friends. Most notably, the Iraq venture would have had a better chance of succeeding if cronyism and corruption hadn't undermined reconstruction.
Still, Republicans should feel good. Those legislative successes show that the political machine can still deliver the goods, even at a time when a majority of Americans disapprove of Mr. Bush's leadership and believe that his administration deliberately misled us into war.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
August 1, 2005
Triumph of the Machine
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The campaign for Social Security privatization has degenerated into farce. The "global war on terrorism" has been downgraded to the "global struggle against violent extremism" (pronounced gee-save), which is just embarrassing. Baghdad is a nightmare, Basra is a militia-run theocracy, and officials are talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq next year (just in time for the U.S. midterm elections).
On the other hand, the administration is crowing about its success in passing the long-stalled energy bill, the highway bill and Cafta, the free-trade agreement with Central America. So is the Bush agenda stalled, or is it progressing?
The answer is that the administration is getting nowhere on its grand policy agenda. But it never took policy, as opposed to politics, very seriously anyway. The agenda it has always taken with utmost seriousness - consolidating one-party rule, and rewarding its friends - is moving forward quite nicely.
One of President Bush's great political talents is his ability to convince people who do care passionately about policy that he is one of them. Foreign-policy neoconservatives believe he shares their vision of a world transformed by American power. Economic conservatives believe he shares their dedication to dismantling the welfare state.
But a serious effort either to transform the world or to dismantle the welfare state would require sacrifices Mr. Bush hasn't been willing to make.
On the foreign policy front, the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emption and unilateralism sounded very impressive at first. But Mr. Bush's tough-guy attitude wasn't matched by his willingness to commit resources. His administration sought global dominance on the cheap, with an undermanned, underplanned invasion of Iraq that has, indeed, transformed the balance of power in the Middle East - in favor of Iran.
On the domestic policy front, talk of an "ownership society" appealed to conservatives who dreamed of rolling back the New Deal. But Mr. Bush has expanded, not reduced, middle-class entitlements. Only the poor and powerless have faced cuts. (I don't think those middle-class entitlements should be cut. But Mr. Bush claims to be against big government.)
Social Security privatization was to the crusade against the welfare state what the invasion of Iraq was to G-Save: an attempt to achieve radical goals on the cheap. Rather than openly propose reductions in entitlement spending, the administration tried to sell a phaseout of traditional Social Security benefits in return for the magic of investing. But the public didn't buy it.
So what about those legislative successes? Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, called the victories "verification that this is a governing party." But governing means more than handing out goodies.
Let's start with the energy bill. Even the bill's supporters barely pretend that it will do anything to reduce America's dependence on imported oil. It's simply an exercise in corporate welfare, full of subsidies and targeted tax breaks.
Then there's the pork-stuffed highway bill. I guess we'll have to stop making fun of Japanese public works spending: now America, too, is building bridges to islands that have almost no inhabitants, but lie in the districts of influential legislators.
Finally, Cafta contains "free trade" in its title, but that's misleading. The administration rammed the bill through the House by, among other things, promising to limit imports of clothing from China; over all, the effect may well be to reduce, not increase, international trade. But pharmaceutical companies got measures that protect and extend their monopoly rights in Central America.
These bills don't have anything to do with governing, if governing means trying to achieve actual policy goals like energy independence or expanded trade. They're just machine politics at work, favors granted in return for favors received.
In fact, you can argue that the administration does a bad job at governing in part because its highest priority is always to reward its friends. Most notably, the Iraq venture would have had a better chance of succeeding if cronyism and corruption hadn't undermined reconstruction.
Still, Republicans should feel good. Those legislative successes show that the political machine can still deliver the goods, even at a time when a majority of Americans disapprove of Mr. Bush's leadership and believe that his administration deliberately misled us into war.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Scrap Metal, Not Soldiers - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com
Scrap Metal, Not Soldiers - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com
BG: Not even a mention of Depleted Uranium (DU)?!
BG: Not even a mention of Depleted Uranium (DU)?!
Sunday, July 31, 2005
How to Stop the Contagion - Newsweek World News - MSNBC.com
How to Stop the Contagion - Newsweek World News - MSNBC.com
BG: Where's the info about the Black Ops?
BG: Where's the info about the Black Ops?
How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension - New York Times
How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension - New York Times
The New York Times
July 31, 2005
How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.
So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.
Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."
"Everybody knows stocks are cyclical," Mr. Wilsman said last week. So is the airline business. All along, he said, he thought it was almost inevitable that both would one day go south at the same time, with catastrophic results - which is just what happened this year.
Given Mr. Wilsman's prescience, one might think that experts would be examining how United's investment strategies contributed to the demise of its pension funds - and whether similar scrutiny elsewhere could prevent more pension plans from crashing.
Not a chance. Congress, regulators, lobbyists and the news media are all scrambling to find out what has gone wrong with the pension system. Hearings have been convened in the wake of United's default, chief executives examined under oath, bills introduced in Congress, numbers crunched. But virtually everyone is looking at the rules covering how much money a company puts into a pension plan every year - not at what happens to the money after that.
While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has said that since 1974, when the insurance program was created, United has paid a little less than $100 million in premiums to insure employees' pensions. Of the $6.8 billion the agency will pay United's retirees in coming years, all but what United paid in premiums will be borne by the other companies participating in the insurance program.
If those companies ever tire of footing other companies' bills, they may cancel their pension plans and drop out of the system. At that point, the taxpayers will have to step in.
United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.
It's impossible to get a current list of a company's pension investments. The most detailed, up-to-date information, on file at the Labor Department, is at least two years old.
The Labor Department records also show that the money managers, actuaries, consultants and other professionals who handled United's pension plan earned about $125 million from 1999 to 2003, paid out of plan assets. The records are silent on how the individual money managers performed, nor do they even mention United's main pension consultant, the Russell Investment Group, or how much it was paid.
OFFICIALS at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that takes over pension funds when they fail, are combing through United's pension documents, trying to ascertain how much the agency owes. What is clear is that as United's pension obligations soared, its pension assets fell. By the time the airline turned over its plan to the pension agency, the shortfall was $10.2 billion.
While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.
"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."
United's actions offer a typical example of how most companies manage their pension funds. Its portfolio may look aggressive in hindsight - including high-yield bonds in companies like Adelphia and Bethlehem Steel that eventually went bankrupt, technology stocks that evaporated when the bubble burst and an assortment of private partnerships.
But the general approach was in keeping with what most companies do: about 60 percent stocks, 30 percent bonds and a mixture of "alternatives" including real estate and private equity investments. Local governments often invest their pension funds much more aggressively.
A spokeswoman for United, Jean Medina, said United's pension investments "have outperformed other similar large plans." She added: "United has always operated our plans in the best interests of our participants and beneficiaries, and believe our advisers act similarly."
Companies do not generally invest their pension money themselves, but instead farm out the work to an array of outside professionals. There are pension consultants to help set an investment strategy and recommend the money managers who actually pick the stocks and other particular investments. There are actuaries to design benefits packages and calculate how much companies need to contribute each year.
Custodial banks hold the assets in trust. Brokers execute trades. Once a year, an outside auditor is supposed to review the plan and issue an opinion about its conformity with generally accepted accounting principles.
Problems can arise when there are undisclosed relationships among these different service providers.
"Asset allocation is very much driven by hidden financial considerations," said Edward A. H. Siedle, the president of Benchmark Financial Services, a company that audits pension funds. He said one reason that pension funds tend to invest heavily in high-turnover, active equities is that "those investments have commissions and fees that can be shared with gatekeepers and others that pave the way." Companies that sponsor pension plans can also reap accounting gains if they increase the risk of their pension investments.
There are regulations and other legal safeguards intended to protect pensions, and companies often cite the cost and difficulty of complying with those rules. But much of this protective superstructure was designed decades ago, before the rise of the independent money manager - and before some of today's investment instruments were invented.
"Pensions are heavily regulated," Mr. Siedle said, "yet it's a kind of funny regulation where the regulators who are responsible for pensions really don't know much about managing money."
Thus there are rules to make sure that pension plans are not really tax shelters in disguise, rules to make sure companies treat low- and high-income workers equitably and, since 1989, rules to keep companies from taking money out of pension funds and using it to run their businesses.
But there is no rule limiting aggressive investment strategies or requiring companies that want to pursue them to pay more for their pension insurance.
Congress sets the premium rates, and there are bills in both houses that would raise them. But even now, the bills make no mention of studying, much less capping, investment risk, or of setting insurance premiums based on portfolio risk factors.
The S.E.C. monitors investment advisers but has no legal standing to enforce the pension rules. In a study, released in May, of pension consultants, it found the industry vulnerable to abuse and referred a dozen consultants to its investigative branch for possible enforcement action.
But it did not name individual consulting firms it suspected of conflicts, nor did it look specifically at how United's pension consultant, the Russell Investment Group, performed in the years leading up to the collapse of the airline's plans. Nor did the S.E.C. say if Russell was one of the consultants now being investigated more deeply.
A spokeswoman for Russell, Jennifer Tice, said the company had not received any inquiries from S.E.C. since the commission completed its general examination of the industry.
Ms. Tice said Russell could not explain why its name and fees were not listed in the United plan's official records, noting that plan sponsors file those records, not the consultant. United said Russell's omission from its filings was an oversight. Both Russell and United declined to say how Russell was compensated.
Ms. Tice, however, said Russell helps its clients answer any questions raised by the S.E.C.'s findings, and regularly tells its consulting clients in the United States about potential conflicts of interest and Russell's policies for managing them. "Russell is committed to full and timely disclosure of any potential conflicts of interest," she said.
THE Internal Revenue Service provides yet another layer of protection to pensions, but it has authority only over how companies design their benefits and contribute money to their plans - not over whether they have fulfilled their fiduciary duty to invest prudently. That is a job for the Labor Department.
In June, the Government Accountability Office warned of chronic weakness in the Labor Department's enforcement of the pension law, and said the department ought to be coordinating its efforts with the S.E.C.
The Labor Department also has authority over the disclosure of pension data. It collects long lists of all the investments in each pension fund, and of all of the money managers. But it does not track which money managers were responsible for which investments.
That does not sit well with the United employees and retirees who are waiting to find out how much of their pension benefits is covered by the federal pension agency's insurance and how much they may lose.
"When I get a job, I put my name, my file number and my license in a permanent record, and I'm accountable if something goes wrong," said Bob Stone, a lead mechanic for United Airlines who retired this year. "It's possible for every single aircraft mechanic in the country to keep track of every single job they do. But we can't keep track of the money managers. That's too complicated for us."
Because of limits on the government's pension insurance, they will collectively lose benefits worth about $3.4 billion. Pilots will lose the most because they were promised the richest pensions.
Finally, at the end of the regulatory patchwork is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Officials there have access to some of the most current and detailed information about pensions, but they cannot do a lot with it; a 1994 act of Congress requires them to keep it secret.
Officials at the pension agency sometimes confide that they feel like they are running not an agency but a big garbage can, where companies can dump their defunct pension plans, no questions asked.
Earlier this year, when United defaulted, Mr. Stone's union began to ask questions about the money managers who handled its pension plan in its final years - who they were and how they had made their decisions. That labor group, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, began to represent United's mechanics only in 2003, after the airline had gone bankrupt. It had no qualms about asking questions about how the pension fund was handled when the previous union had some say over it.
"We have to learn what went wrong," Mr. Stone said. He added that he was sure that some money managers "did their level best for people," but that they all should stand by their decisions. "Unless you separate it out and have accountability," Mr. Stone said, "how are you ever going to reward the good guys and get rid of the bad guys?"
This summer, the labor group wrote to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao and Bradley D. Belt, executive director of the pension agency, asking for a forensic audit of United's pension plans, "to determine whether any of the parties providing financial services to the plans may have contributed to their demise."
The letter, signed by the association's national director, O. V. Delle-Femine, cited the recent S.E.C. report warning of potential conflicts of interest among pension professionals, and it urged the pension agency to find out whether tainted advice had played any role in plan losses or underperformance.
"While the plan sponsor may be bankrupt, the parties that have been dealing with the plan are not," Mr. Delle-Femine wrote. "It may be possible to recover assets from these parties on behalf of the plan's participants."
The association also called for an audit of the pension plans at Northwest Airlines, where it also represents the mechanics. Northwest is still running its pension plans but intends to freeze one of them, for salaried employees, at the end of August, locking in employees' benefits at current levels rather than allowing them to increase as they normally would as people worked longer.
Northwest is also seeking its unions' permission to freeze the other three plans. The airline has been warning that if it does not get a break on its pension funding requirements, it may have to declare bankruptcy sometime next year. Bankruptcy is often a prelude to a pension default.
Mr. Delle-Femine sent his letter in June. So far, said the association's legislative liaison, Maryanne DeMarco, there has been no response from the pension agency. The Labor Department told her that Ms. Chao could not participate in an audit of Northwest's pension plans because she served on that airline's board before her confirmation as labor secretary and had recused herself from any involvement in its labor disputes. The Labor Department has yet to respond to the request for an audit of United's pension fund.
"We're all stunned that there isn't a review taking place," said Bill Moons, a United mechanic and the president of the union's local in Denver. "We all want the truth."
He said he and Mr. Stone were two-time losers, having earlier lost another chunk of their retirement savings when United first went bankrupt and its employee stock ownership program lost all of its value.
The pilots' union had pushed hard for the employee stock ownership program back in the 1980's, at about the same time that Mr. Wilsman, the retired pilot, noticed that the airline had changed its previous investment policy for people like him.
In the past, whenever a pilot retired, the airline used money from the pension fund to buy him or her an annuity from an insurance company. Annuities are lifelong streams of monthly payments, but insurance companies pay them, not pension funds.
Insurance companies are regulated differently, and they have no federal guarantor like the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to cover potential losses. Therefore they tend to invest conservatively, in assets that will not become wildly out of step with the payments they owe.
Mr. Wilsman said he thought that an annuity was a surer thing than a pension promise backed by stocks. He also thought United had violated the terms of the pension plan, and maybe the pilots' labor contract, by making the change unilaterally.
He persuaded other retired pilots to join him in bringing a case before the airline's pension board. Each retiree chipped in $25 to cover the cost of a lawyer. At roughly the same time, Mr. Wilsman also filed a grievance with the union.
But the retired pilots were no match for the siren song of the stock market. The union, which handled their grievance, sided with the airline on investment policy. It said it believed that a high-risk, high-return strategy was best because, over time, it would lower United's compensation costs and free up more money to raise salaries.
"The argument was that the new people could get more benefits if they could do it by gambling than if the plan was secure," Mr. Wilsman said.
A spokesman for the pilots' union said he could not recall Mr. Wilsman's grievance and was unable to comment on it.
Ms. Medina, the United spokeswoman, said that United tried to buy all the pilots' annuities in 1985, as part of a plan to terminate the pension fund and take out the surplus assets for business purposes, but that the pilots' union had blocked it. Two years later, when Mr. Wilsman and the other retirees said they wanted annuities, United told them they were too late, she said.
NOT only were United and the pilots' union lined up against the retirees, Mr. Wilsman said. Even the arbitrator who was brought in to hear the case before the pension board said that he couldn't see why the retirees preferred an annuity to a pension, if the monthly payout was the same either way.
"He said that as far as he was concerned, there was absolutely no difference between an annuity and the company's promise," Mr. Wilsman recalled. Afterward, he said, he thought he should have come up with an example of why they weren't the same, but he was tired of arguing with people dead-set against him. So he withdrew the grievance.
"It has always haunted me that I failed to cite an example," he said in a recent telephone interview.
But the best example didn't happen until 18 years later.
The New York Times
July 31, 2005
How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.
So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.
Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."
"Everybody knows stocks are cyclical," Mr. Wilsman said last week. So is the airline business. All along, he said, he thought it was almost inevitable that both would one day go south at the same time, with catastrophic results - which is just what happened this year.
Given Mr. Wilsman's prescience, one might think that experts would be examining how United's investment strategies contributed to the demise of its pension funds - and whether similar scrutiny elsewhere could prevent more pension plans from crashing.
Not a chance. Congress, regulators, lobbyists and the news media are all scrambling to find out what has gone wrong with the pension system. Hearings have been convened in the wake of United's default, chief executives examined under oath, bills introduced in Congress, numbers crunched. But virtually everyone is looking at the rules covering how much money a company puts into a pension plan every year - not at what happens to the money after that.
While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has said that since 1974, when the insurance program was created, United has paid a little less than $100 million in premiums to insure employees' pensions. Of the $6.8 billion the agency will pay United's retirees in coming years, all but what United paid in premiums will be borne by the other companies participating in the insurance program.
If those companies ever tire of footing other companies' bills, they may cancel their pension plans and drop out of the system. At that point, the taxpayers will have to step in.
United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.
It's impossible to get a current list of a company's pension investments. The most detailed, up-to-date information, on file at the Labor Department, is at least two years old.
The Labor Department records also show that the money managers, actuaries, consultants and other professionals who handled United's pension plan earned about $125 million from 1999 to 2003, paid out of plan assets. The records are silent on how the individual money managers performed, nor do they even mention United's main pension consultant, the Russell Investment Group, or how much it was paid.
OFFICIALS at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that takes over pension funds when they fail, are combing through United's pension documents, trying to ascertain how much the agency owes. What is clear is that as United's pension obligations soared, its pension assets fell. By the time the airline turned over its plan to the pension agency, the shortfall was $10.2 billion.
While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.
"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."
United's actions offer a typical example of how most companies manage their pension funds. Its portfolio may look aggressive in hindsight - including high-yield bonds in companies like Adelphia and Bethlehem Steel that eventually went bankrupt, technology stocks that evaporated when the bubble burst and an assortment of private partnerships.
But the general approach was in keeping with what most companies do: about 60 percent stocks, 30 percent bonds and a mixture of "alternatives" including real estate and private equity investments. Local governments often invest their pension funds much more aggressively.
A spokeswoman for United, Jean Medina, said United's pension investments "have outperformed other similar large plans." She added: "United has always operated our plans in the best interests of our participants and beneficiaries, and believe our advisers act similarly."
Companies do not generally invest their pension money themselves, but instead farm out the work to an array of outside professionals. There are pension consultants to help set an investment strategy and recommend the money managers who actually pick the stocks and other particular investments. There are actuaries to design benefits packages and calculate how much companies need to contribute each year.
Custodial banks hold the assets in trust. Brokers execute trades. Once a year, an outside auditor is supposed to review the plan and issue an opinion about its conformity with generally accepted accounting principles.
Problems can arise when there are undisclosed relationships among these different service providers.
"Asset allocation is very much driven by hidden financial considerations," said Edward A. H. Siedle, the president of Benchmark Financial Services, a company that audits pension funds. He said one reason that pension funds tend to invest heavily in high-turnover, active equities is that "those investments have commissions and fees that can be shared with gatekeepers and others that pave the way." Companies that sponsor pension plans can also reap accounting gains if they increase the risk of their pension investments.
There are regulations and other legal safeguards intended to protect pensions, and companies often cite the cost and difficulty of complying with those rules. But much of this protective superstructure was designed decades ago, before the rise of the independent money manager - and before some of today's investment instruments were invented.
"Pensions are heavily regulated," Mr. Siedle said, "yet it's a kind of funny regulation where the regulators who are responsible for pensions really don't know much about managing money."
Thus there are rules to make sure that pension plans are not really tax shelters in disguise, rules to make sure companies treat low- and high-income workers equitably and, since 1989, rules to keep companies from taking money out of pension funds and using it to run their businesses.
But there is no rule limiting aggressive investment strategies or requiring companies that want to pursue them to pay more for their pension insurance.
Congress sets the premium rates, and there are bills in both houses that would raise them. But even now, the bills make no mention of studying, much less capping, investment risk, or of setting insurance premiums based on portfolio risk factors.
The S.E.C. monitors investment advisers but has no legal standing to enforce the pension rules. In a study, released in May, of pension consultants, it found the industry vulnerable to abuse and referred a dozen consultants to its investigative branch for possible enforcement action.
But it did not name individual consulting firms it suspected of conflicts, nor did it look specifically at how United's pension consultant, the Russell Investment Group, performed in the years leading up to the collapse of the airline's plans. Nor did the S.E.C. say if Russell was one of the consultants now being investigated more deeply.
A spokeswoman for Russell, Jennifer Tice, said the company had not received any inquiries from S.E.C. since the commission completed its general examination of the industry.
Ms. Tice said Russell could not explain why its name and fees were not listed in the United plan's official records, noting that plan sponsors file those records, not the consultant. United said Russell's omission from its filings was an oversight. Both Russell and United declined to say how Russell was compensated.
Ms. Tice, however, said Russell helps its clients answer any questions raised by the S.E.C.'s findings, and regularly tells its consulting clients in the United States about potential conflicts of interest and Russell's policies for managing them. "Russell is committed to full and timely disclosure of any potential conflicts of interest," she said.
THE Internal Revenue Service provides yet another layer of protection to pensions, but it has authority only over how companies design their benefits and contribute money to their plans - not over whether they have fulfilled their fiduciary duty to invest prudently. That is a job for the Labor Department.
In June, the Government Accountability Office warned of chronic weakness in the Labor Department's enforcement of the pension law, and said the department ought to be coordinating its efforts with the S.E.C.
The Labor Department also has authority over the disclosure of pension data. It collects long lists of all the investments in each pension fund, and of all of the money managers. But it does not track which money managers were responsible for which investments.
That does not sit well with the United employees and retirees who are waiting to find out how much of their pension benefits is covered by the federal pension agency's insurance and how much they may lose.
"When I get a job, I put my name, my file number and my license in a permanent record, and I'm accountable if something goes wrong," said Bob Stone, a lead mechanic for United Airlines who retired this year. "It's possible for every single aircraft mechanic in the country to keep track of every single job they do. But we can't keep track of the money managers. That's too complicated for us."
Because of limits on the government's pension insurance, they will collectively lose benefits worth about $3.4 billion. Pilots will lose the most because they were promised the richest pensions.
Finally, at the end of the regulatory patchwork is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Officials there have access to some of the most current and detailed information about pensions, but they cannot do a lot with it; a 1994 act of Congress requires them to keep it secret.
Officials at the pension agency sometimes confide that they feel like they are running not an agency but a big garbage can, where companies can dump their defunct pension plans, no questions asked.
Earlier this year, when United defaulted, Mr. Stone's union began to ask questions about the money managers who handled its pension plan in its final years - who they were and how they had made their decisions. That labor group, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, began to represent United's mechanics only in 2003, after the airline had gone bankrupt. It had no qualms about asking questions about how the pension fund was handled when the previous union had some say over it.
"We have to learn what went wrong," Mr. Stone said. He added that he was sure that some money managers "did their level best for people," but that they all should stand by their decisions. "Unless you separate it out and have accountability," Mr. Stone said, "how are you ever going to reward the good guys and get rid of the bad guys?"
This summer, the labor group wrote to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao and Bradley D. Belt, executive director of the pension agency, asking for a forensic audit of United's pension plans, "to determine whether any of the parties providing financial services to the plans may have contributed to their demise."
The letter, signed by the association's national director, O. V. Delle-Femine, cited the recent S.E.C. report warning of potential conflicts of interest among pension professionals, and it urged the pension agency to find out whether tainted advice had played any role in plan losses or underperformance.
"While the plan sponsor may be bankrupt, the parties that have been dealing with the plan are not," Mr. Delle-Femine wrote. "It may be possible to recover assets from these parties on behalf of the plan's participants."
The association also called for an audit of the pension plans at Northwest Airlines, where it also represents the mechanics. Northwest is still running its pension plans but intends to freeze one of them, for salaried employees, at the end of August, locking in employees' benefits at current levels rather than allowing them to increase as they normally would as people worked longer.
Northwest is also seeking its unions' permission to freeze the other three plans. The airline has been warning that if it does not get a break on its pension funding requirements, it may have to declare bankruptcy sometime next year. Bankruptcy is often a prelude to a pension default.
Mr. Delle-Femine sent his letter in June. So far, said the association's legislative liaison, Maryanne DeMarco, there has been no response from the pension agency. The Labor Department told her that Ms. Chao could not participate in an audit of Northwest's pension plans because she served on that airline's board before her confirmation as labor secretary and had recused herself from any involvement in its labor disputes. The Labor Department has yet to respond to the request for an audit of United's pension fund.
"We're all stunned that there isn't a review taking place," said Bill Moons, a United mechanic and the president of the union's local in Denver. "We all want the truth."
He said he and Mr. Stone were two-time losers, having earlier lost another chunk of their retirement savings when United first went bankrupt and its employee stock ownership program lost all of its value.
The pilots' union had pushed hard for the employee stock ownership program back in the 1980's, at about the same time that Mr. Wilsman, the retired pilot, noticed that the airline had changed its previous investment policy for people like him.
In the past, whenever a pilot retired, the airline used money from the pension fund to buy him or her an annuity from an insurance company. Annuities are lifelong streams of monthly payments, but insurance companies pay them, not pension funds.
Insurance companies are regulated differently, and they have no federal guarantor like the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to cover potential losses. Therefore they tend to invest conservatively, in assets that will not become wildly out of step with the payments they owe.
Mr. Wilsman said he thought that an annuity was a surer thing than a pension promise backed by stocks. He also thought United had violated the terms of the pension plan, and maybe the pilots' labor contract, by making the change unilaterally.
He persuaded other retired pilots to join him in bringing a case before the airline's pension board. Each retiree chipped in $25 to cover the cost of a lawyer. At roughly the same time, Mr. Wilsman also filed a grievance with the union.
But the retired pilots were no match for the siren song of the stock market. The union, which handled their grievance, sided with the airline on investment policy. It said it believed that a high-risk, high-return strategy was best because, over time, it would lower United's compensation costs and free up more money to raise salaries.
"The argument was that the new people could get more benefits if they could do it by gambling than if the plan was secure," Mr. Wilsman said.
A spokesman for the pilots' union said he could not recall Mr. Wilsman's grievance and was unable to comment on it.
Ms. Medina, the United spokeswoman, said that United tried to buy all the pilots' annuities in 1985, as part of a plan to terminate the pension fund and take out the surplus assets for business purposes, but that the pilots' union had blocked it. Two years later, when Mr. Wilsman and the other retirees said they wanted annuities, United told them they were too late, she said.
NOT only were United and the pilots' union lined up against the retirees, Mr. Wilsman said. Even the arbitrator who was brought in to hear the case before the pension board said that he couldn't see why the retirees preferred an annuity to a pension, if the monthly payout was the same either way.
"He said that as far as he was concerned, there was absolutely no difference between an annuity and the company's promise," Mr. Wilsman recalled. Afterward, he said, he thought he should have come up with an example of why they weren't the same, but he was tired of arguing with people dead-set against him. So he withdrew the grievance.
"It has always haunted me that I failed to cite an example," he said in a recent telephone interview.
But the best example didn't happen until 18 years later.
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Co-founder of lead ex-gay group says it's all bunk
AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth
Co-founder of lead ex-gay group says it's all bunk.
Co-founder of lead ex-gay group says it's all bunk.
Umbert The Unborn, the world's most lovable unborn baby (next to yours!)
Umbert The Unborn, the world's most lovable unborn baby (next to yours!)
BG: "Coming soon, see and hear Umbert in the Womb...."
BG: "Coming soon, see and hear Umbert in the Womb...."
The Roots of Prisoner Abuse - New York Times
The Roots of Prisoner Abuse - New York Times The New York Times
July 30, 2005
The Roots of Prisoner Abuse
This week, the White House blocked a Senate vote on a measure sponsored by a half-dozen Republicans, including Senator John McCain, that would prohibit cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners. Besides being outrageous on its face, that action served as a reminder of how the Bush administration ducks for cover behind the men and women in uniform when challenged on military policy, but ignores their advice when it seems inconvenient.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has shown real political courage on this issue, recently released documents showing that the military's top lawyers had warned a year before the Abu Ghraib nightmare came to light that detainee policies imposed by the White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld violated American and international law and undermined the standards of civilized treatment embedded in the American military tradition.
In February 2003, Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, reminded his civilian bosses that American rules on the treatment of prisoners had grown out of Vietnam, where captured Americans, like Mr. McCain, were tortured. "We have taken the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," he wrote. Abandoning those rules, he said, endangered every American soldier.
General Rives and the other military lawyers argued strongly against declaring that Mr. Bush was above the law when it came to antiterrorism operations. But the president's team ignored them, offering up a pretzel logic that General Rives and the other military experts warned would not fool anyone. Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, the Navy's judge advocate general, said that the situation at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba might be so legalistically unique that the Geneva Conventions and even the Constitution did not necessarily apply. But he asked, "Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"
General Rives said that if the White House permitted abusive interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, it would not be able to restrict them to that single prison. He argued that soldiers elsewhere would conclude that their commanders were condoning illegal behavior. And that is precisely what happened at Abu Ghraib after the general who organized the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo went to Iraq to toughen up the interrogation of prisoners there.
The White House ignored these military lawyers' advice two years ago. Now it is trying to kill the measure that would define the term "illegal combatants," set rules for interrogations and prohibit cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The president considers this an undue restriction of his powers. It's not only due; it's way overdue.
July 30, 2005
The Roots of Prisoner Abuse
This week, the White House blocked a Senate vote on a measure sponsored by a half-dozen Republicans, including Senator John McCain, that would prohibit cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners. Besides being outrageous on its face, that action served as a reminder of how the Bush administration ducks for cover behind the men and women in uniform when challenged on military policy, but ignores their advice when it seems inconvenient.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has shown real political courage on this issue, recently released documents showing that the military's top lawyers had warned a year before the Abu Ghraib nightmare came to light that detainee policies imposed by the White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld violated American and international law and undermined the standards of civilized treatment embedded in the American military tradition.
In February 2003, Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, reminded his civilian bosses that American rules on the treatment of prisoners had grown out of Vietnam, where captured Americans, like Mr. McCain, were tortured. "We have taken the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," he wrote. Abandoning those rules, he said, endangered every American soldier.
General Rives and the other military lawyers argued strongly against declaring that Mr. Bush was above the law when it came to antiterrorism operations. But the president's team ignored them, offering up a pretzel logic that General Rives and the other military experts warned would not fool anyone. Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, the Navy's judge advocate general, said that the situation at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba might be so legalistically unique that the Geneva Conventions and even the Constitution did not necessarily apply. But he asked, "Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"
General Rives said that if the White House permitted abusive interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, it would not be able to restrict them to that single prison. He argued that soldiers elsewhere would conclude that their commanders were condoning illegal behavior. And that is precisely what happened at Abu Ghraib after the general who organized the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo went to Iraq to toughen up the interrogation of prisoners there.
The White House ignored these military lawyers' advice two years ago. Now it is trying to kill the measure that would define the term "illegal combatants," set rules for interrogations and prohibit cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The president considers this an undue restriction of his powers. It's not only due; it's way overdue.
White House Memos Offer Opinions on Supreme Court - New York Times
White House Memos Offer Opinions on Supreme Court - New York Times: "
July 30, 2005
White House Memos Offer Opinions on Supreme Court
By JOHN M. BRODER and CAROLYN MARSHALL
LOS ANGELES, July 29 - For those seeking clues to the judicial philosophy of John G. Roberts, documents from his years as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration provide revealing evidence.
In early 1983, Mr. Roberts was asked to analyze a proposal pushed by Warren E. Burger, then the chief justice, to create a new, national-level federal appeals court to relieve some of the Supreme Court's workload.
Mr. Roberts wrote in a memorandum to his boss, Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, that he thought creation of the new court, known as the intercircuit tribunal, was a 'terrible idea.' Mr. Roberts, who is President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, said the court had only itself to blame for its burden of cases.
'If the justices truly think they are overworked, the cure lies close at hand,' Mr. Roberts wrote. 'The fault lies with the justices themselves, who unnecessarily take too many cases and issue opinions so confusing that they often do not even resolve the question presented.'
He wrote that if the court took fewer death penalty and prisoner-rights cases, the docket would be cut by at least a half-dozen cases a year. He added a comment that may signal his view of the Supreme Court's proper role.
'So long as the court views itself as ultimately responsible for governing all aspects of our society, it will, understandably, be overworked,' Mr. Roberts wrote. 'A new court will not solve this problem.'
Mr. Roberts worked in the Reagan White House counsel's office from 1982 to 1986. The files were among pap"
July 30, 2005
White House Memos Offer Opinions on Supreme Court
By JOHN M. BRODER and CAROLYN MARSHALL
LOS ANGELES, July 29 - For those seeking clues to the judicial philosophy of John G. Roberts, documents from his years as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration provide revealing evidence.
In early 1983, Mr. Roberts was asked to analyze a proposal pushed by Warren E. Burger, then the chief justice, to create a new, national-level federal appeals court to relieve some of the Supreme Court's workload.
Mr. Roberts wrote in a memorandum to his boss, Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, that he thought creation of the new court, known as the intercircuit tribunal, was a 'terrible idea.' Mr. Roberts, who is President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, said the court had only itself to blame for its burden of cases.
'If the justices truly think they are overworked, the cure lies close at hand,' Mr. Roberts wrote. 'The fault lies with the justices themselves, who unnecessarily take too many cases and issue opinions so confusing that they often do not even resolve the question presented.'
He wrote that if the court took fewer death penalty and prisoner-rights cases, the docket would be cut by at least a half-dozen cases a year. He added a comment that may signal his view of the Supreme Court's proper role.
'So long as the court views itself as ultimately responsible for governing all aspects of our society, it will, understandably, be overworked,' Mr. Roberts wrote. 'A new court will not solve this problem.'
Mr. Roberts worked in the Reagan White House counsel's office from 1982 to 1986. The files were among pap"
Culture of Life Media News: THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH CONSPIRACY
Culture of Life Media News: THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH CONSPIRACY
" THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH CONSPIRACY
Today is very interesting. Daliwood, one of our wonderful readers, gave me amazing information. I went off to confirm it on the net last night and didn't go to bed until after 1 am. I used a wild combination of key words, googling an increasing stream of key words like "listing" and "Thunderhorse" and "oil rig", "Texas", "Gulf, hurricane Dennis" and finally got a rigger's chat room and Resource Investor.com.
Evidently, they have been covering this story for two weeks.
Now, I watch oil news like a hawk. I muck around in rather obscure corners, seeking information, looking for data and photos. Note I have mentioned nothing about this matter. But the key thing is, not one of our news media have, either! This is a key to what is going wrong with our nation.
The price of oil is hitting everyone. I watch it rise relentlessly. The stock market went up this week on all sorts of data that was produced before the oil rig collapsed. So everyone thinks, the oil problem is solved. No need to change course or even worry! The government data showing we have slid even further behind in our quest for automotive efficiency was deliberately withheld by Bush and Cheney and only appeared in the news, with little comment, because someone brave leaked it to the press, who then didn't say much about it all!
My magic article was about all of this.
Here are more photos of the rigs collapsing courtesy of Resource Investor:f(From MediaLib.com)
f
Another reader of my blog, Stealth Badger, gave me the urls of Investor Resource (which I found also on my own last night, you can bet, it became part of my "must read" bookmarks!). Here is what he said,
Thunderhorse has been listing at 20 degrees for a bit over two weeks now. I'm terribly surprised it's still at that angle, but the fact that it hasn't gotten worse means BP probably dodged a bullet, so to speak.
What I don't understand is why these companies are holding on so tight to fossil fuels, despite the obvious dead-end they represent, in more ways than one. Especially ExxonMobil, the CEO of which believes that some exploration into alternative fuel sources by Exxon in the 80s gives him enough expertise on the subject to dismiss it as categorically worthless.
They see putting a half a billion dollars out in the middle of the ocean as a good investment, where they KNOW every storm that passes by is going to smack the hell out of it, but don't see getting out of the oil trade as necessary for long-term survival.
Our economic system has been, and is, staggeringly myopic and monomaniacal.
I want to thank my readers for this sort of information. This isn't "people giving opinions" but rather, people searching for information and sharing it. And we are reduced to doing in on this small blog because our oil overlords and Bush and Cheney who are the same, are keeping this stuff hidden from view. The mass media cooperates with them.
Don't want to panic us!
They will blandly talk about how the price of oil is going up mysteriously and I do note in my readings, seeing quite a few articles accusing oil futures traders for this. The stock market shot up despite this news existing and I cannot fathom anyone feeling that we will "be going strong" with this data flowing in!
The oil explorations going on in the oceans are vastly more vulnerable and dangerous than on land. In the North Sea, rigs have collapsed spectacularily. It is dangerous work on those rigs. They are much move vulnerable to terrorist attacks than rigs on land and much harder to guard in heavy ocean traffic areas like the Arabian Gulf.
The press pretends the public want to see photos and stories about missing white women on vacation in Aruba but don't want to see this. This is a big, fat lie. If it is true, then the ostrich attitude is perfect for us being decapitated. Even if the masses in America don't want to see this, it should, like the torture pictures we tried to ignore, be shoved in our fat faces. The media isn't merely a money grinding machine, it is there to inform us even if only 10% of the viewers/readers understand the importance of the news and acts accordingly.
Hiding it is a crime. It endangers my life, your lives. It endangers our collective efforts to stay alive and well. This deliberate refusal to cover many important news stories and worse, the refusal of the pundits to connect what looks to me to be obvious events is a crime. They aren't clueless because no one tells them anything! I used to waste two hours every day sending emails for years to the major media, patiently explaining how things work in tandem, suggesting sources, suggesting lines of investigation.
Nothing. I used to get cheeky, breezy replies from reporters, then after 9/11, silence.
My very last email I ever sent to a reporter tallking about coming events was sent at 8:49 am, Sept. 11, 2001. In it, I said, "Because of our pressuring the NYT, WP and Wall Street Journal, the ballot counting being done by this consortium is now finished by they won't reveal that Gore won by over 20,000 votes in Florida and thus, the Supreme Court ruling was false and should be overturned. You can bet, Bush knows this, too, and will have some spectacular attack on NYC to kill this story. So keep your eyes open."
Then my phone rang.
You know the rest. Now how did I know this information? I went to my library yesterday, seeking it. And found it. As a child, I read C.S. Lewis, all his works, and memorized most of them. And here is was, the blueprint for taking over the earth:
f
f
f
This excerpt finishes with the hero marveling how millions read what he writes even though he is clueless about the subject matter. He also marvels about how his misinformation is being slurped up by the major media uncritically. And how they also hide news even from himself. He wonders at the magical change in his status, for he now works for a secret cabal that has great influence but needs human tools to do the work so their own fingerprints won't appear in public.
In America today, many wonder about the interlocking conspiracies and machinations of the Real Rulers. These people exist, they are very much real and they outrageously manipulate information and events so they can run things for their own benefit. They allow us to live but periodically, even that is pulled out from under us, two very spectacular examples are WWI and WWII.
Both wars ended up endangering them and they escaped being executed or assassinated by the skin of their collective teeth. This is why WWIII hasn't happened...yet. For events often escape their controls. You can bet, if they wanted WWIII, it would happen no matter how many humans across the planet march to stop it. They don't need to listen to us, do they?
Right now, they want peace but not quiet. So we must be afraid, be very afraid but not be afraid at all. We must go shopping and be happy but be scared enough to let the police do their brutal work, let the terrorists do their part of the game, let this whole thing trundle along while they set up the next step in this vast game to see who will inherit the earth!
We see the tension in their actions. They reveal and hide simultaneously. They must use courtiers like Murdoch, who they actually despise, doing his job, manipulating the news. You can bet, if he oversteps their boundries or says the wrong thing or whatever, he will, like some of his contemporaries, suddenly fall off his yaught or his jet will crash or his palace will burn down with him inside.
He knows this and is very careful to serve them well.
These rulers don't want us to panic about oil. This is why Bush called the only Representative in the House who finally put the words "Hubbert Oil Peak" into the Congressional Record, into the Oval Office and he sat there with a smirk and pretened to be surprised to hear all the data and information about the Hubbert Oil Peak and the poor Congressman, a smart man but a fool, thought he was giving Bush vital information that Bush didn't already know.
Geeze. You know, Bush has known about this the same number of years I have: 31 years. I lectured about this matter for years, back in the seventies. Then the media suddenly stopped talking to me when Reagan took over and only ABC has broken the silence.
Why did Bush pretend to be unaware of the most important issue wracking the oil industry? Well, readers of this blog know why. And this is why we all know there will be another "terrorist attack" on America. To unite us against some pathetic peasant community that happens to be sitting on some oil."
" THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH CONSPIRACY
Today is very interesting. Daliwood, one of our wonderful readers, gave me amazing information. I went off to confirm it on the net last night and didn't go to bed until after 1 am. I used a wild combination of key words, googling an increasing stream of key words like "listing" and "Thunderhorse" and "oil rig", "Texas", "Gulf, hurricane Dennis" and finally got a rigger's chat room and Resource Investor.com.
Evidently, they have been covering this story for two weeks.
Now, I watch oil news like a hawk. I muck around in rather obscure corners, seeking information, looking for data and photos. Note I have mentioned nothing about this matter. But the key thing is, not one of our news media have, either! This is a key to what is going wrong with our nation.
The price of oil is hitting everyone. I watch it rise relentlessly. The stock market went up this week on all sorts of data that was produced before the oil rig collapsed. So everyone thinks, the oil problem is solved. No need to change course or even worry! The government data showing we have slid even further behind in our quest for automotive efficiency was deliberately withheld by Bush and Cheney and only appeared in the news, with little comment, because someone brave leaked it to the press, who then didn't say much about it all!
My magic article was about all of this.
Here are more photos of the rigs collapsing courtesy of Resource Investor:f(From MediaLib.com)
f
Another reader of my blog, Stealth Badger, gave me the urls of Investor Resource (which I found also on my own last night, you can bet, it became part of my "must read" bookmarks!). Here is what he said,
Thunderhorse has been listing at 20 degrees for a bit over two weeks now. I'm terribly surprised it's still at that angle, but the fact that it hasn't gotten worse means BP probably dodged a bullet, so to speak.
What I don't understand is why these companies are holding on so tight to fossil fuels, despite the obvious dead-end they represent, in more ways than one. Especially ExxonMobil, the CEO of which believes that some exploration into alternative fuel sources by Exxon in the 80s gives him enough expertise on the subject to dismiss it as categorically worthless.
They see putting a half a billion dollars out in the middle of the ocean as a good investment, where they KNOW every storm that passes by is going to smack the hell out of it, but don't see getting out of the oil trade as necessary for long-term survival.
Our economic system has been, and is, staggeringly myopic and monomaniacal.
I want to thank my readers for this sort of information. This isn't "people giving opinions" but rather, people searching for information and sharing it. And we are reduced to doing in on this small blog because our oil overlords and Bush and Cheney who are the same, are keeping this stuff hidden from view. The mass media cooperates with them.
Don't want to panic us!
They will blandly talk about how the price of oil is going up mysteriously and I do note in my readings, seeing quite a few articles accusing oil futures traders for this. The stock market shot up despite this news existing and I cannot fathom anyone feeling that we will "be going strong" with this data flowing in!
The oil explorations going on in the oceans are vastly more vulnerable and dangerous than on land. In the North Sea, rigs have collapsed spectacularily. It is dangerous work on those rigs. They are much move vulnerable to terrorist attacks than rigs on land and much harder to guard in heavy ocean traffic areas like the Arabian Gulf.
The press pretends the public want to see photos and stories about missing white women on vacation in Aruba but don't want to see this. This is a big, fat lie. If it is true, then the ostrich attitude is perfect for us being decapitated. Even if the masses in America don't want to see this, it should, like the torture pictures we tried to ignore, be shoved in our fat faces. The media isn't merely a money grinding machine, it is there to inform us even if only 10% of the viewers/readers understand the importance of the news and acts accordingly.
Hiding it is a crime. It endangers my life, your lives. It endangers our collective efforts to stay alive and well. This deliberate refusal to cover many important news stories and worse, the refusal of the pundits to connect what looks to me to be obvious events is a crime. They aren't clueless because no one tells them anything! I used to waste two hours every day sending emails for years to the major media, patiently explaining how things work in tandem, suggesting sources, suggesting lines of investigation.
Nothing. I used to get cheeky, breezy replies from reporters, then after 9/11, silence.
My very last email I ever sent to a reporter tallking about coming events was sent at 8:49 am, Sept. 11, 2001. In it, I said, "Because of our pressuring the NYT, WP and Wall Street Journal, the ballot counting being done by this consortium is now finished by they won't reveal that Gore won by over 20,000 votes in Florida and thus, the Supreme Court ruling was false and should be overturned. You can bet, Bush knows this, too, and will have some spectacular attack on NYC to kill this story. So keep your eyes open."
Then my phone rang.
You know the rest. Now how did I know this information? I went to my library yesterday, seeking it. And found it. As a child, I read C.S. Lewis, all his works, and memorized most of them. And here is was, the blueprint for taking over the earth:
f
f
f
This excerpt finishes with the hero marveling how millions read what he writes even though he is clueless about the subject matter. He also marvels about how his misinformation is being slurped up by the major media uncritically. And how they also hide news even from himself. He wonders at the magical change in his status, for he now works for a secret cabal that has great influence but needs human tools to do the work so their own fingerprints won't appear in public.
In America today, many wonder about the interlocking conspiracies and machinations of the Real Rulers. These people exist, they are very much real and they outrageously manipulate information and events so they can run things for their own benefit. They allow us to live but periodically, even that is pulled out from under us, two very spectacular examples are WWI and WWII.
Both wars ended up endangering them and they escaped being executed or assassinated by the skin of their collective teeth. This is why WWIII hasn't happened...yet. For events often escape their controls. You can bet, if they wanted WWIII, it would happen no matter how many humans across the planet march to stop it. They don't need to listen to us, do they?
Right now, they want peace but not quiet. So we must be afraid, be very afraid but not be afraid at all. We must go shopping and be happy but be scared enough to let the police do their brutal work, let the terrorists do their part of the game, let this whole thing trundle along while they set up the next step in this vast game to see who will inherit the earth!
We see the tension in their actions. They reveal and hide simultaneously. They must use courtiers like Murdoch, who they actually despise, doing his job, manipulating the news. You can bet, if he oversteps their boundries or says the wrong thing or whatever, he will, like some of his contemporaries, suddenly fall off his yaught or his jet will crash or his palace will burn down with him inside.
He knows this and is very careful to serve them well.
These rulers don't want us to panic about oil. This is why Bush called the only Representative in the House who finally put the words "Hubbert Oil Peak" into the Congressional Record, into the Oval Office and he sat there with a smirk and pretened to be surprised to hear all the data and information about the Hubbert Oil Peak and the poor Congressman, a smart man but a fool, thought he was giving Bush vital information that Bush didn't already know.
Geeze. You know, Bush has known about this the same number of years I have: 31 years. I lectured about this matter for years, back in the seventies. Then the media suddenly stopped talking to me when Reagan took over and only ABC has broken the silence.
Why did Bush pretend to be unaware of the most important issue wracking the oil industry? Well, readers of this blog know why. And this is why we all know there will be another "terrorist attack" on America. To unite us against some pathetic peasant community that happens to be sitting on some oil."
Wayne Madsen Report
Wayne Madsen Report
July 29, 2005 -- Ex-GOP Senator Warns Bush administration planning to fire Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as US Attorney for Chicago. The Chicago Tribune is reporting today that former Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who championed current CIA leak Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for appointment as US Attorney for Chicago in Sept. 2001, is warning that because of the U.S. Attorney's high profile criminal investigations of former GOP Gov. George Ryan and Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, he may not be reappointed to his post when his four year term expires in late October. If Bush fails to nominate a replacement and Fitzgerald is not renominated, he will be able to serve as US Attorney until a replacement is named. It may not be coincidental that the Grand Jury investigating top White House officials for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent will also expire in October if it is not re-impaneled on a request by Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald. With the clock potentially running out for Patrick Fitzgerald, if there are indictments in the CIA leak, they will likely be issued within the next few months. Peter Fitzgerald, who is not related to the Special Prosecutor, believes that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, as the dean of the Illinois congressional delegation, will recommend to President Bush that Fitzgerald not be reappointed as U.S. Attorney. It is no secret that top Illinois Republicans, as well as the Daley political machine, are gunning for Patrick Fitzgerald. Daley has been a major supporter of Bush's foreign policy who joined the GOP in criticizing Illinois Democratic Senator Richard Durbin for his remarks about the interrogation tactics used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It is doubtful Patrick Fitzgerald would be kept on as Special Prosecutor by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales if he is rejected by the White House for a second term as US Prosecutor -- a decision that would be seen as a loss in confidence in Fitzgerald by the Bush administration. The recent resignation of Patrick Fitzgerald's friend, career Justice Department prosecutor James Comey, as Deputy Attorney General -- and Fitzgerald's immediate supervisor -- is also a warning sign that the Bush administration is growing uncomfortable with the direction of Fitzgerald's investigation. Comey is to be replaced by Timothy E. Flanigan, a conservative GOP political hack and a Federalist Society colleague of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts. Flanigan, along with Roberts, was a member of the 2000 Florida GOP recount team. Flanigan was later the general counsel for the scandal-plagued Tyco International Ltd., which is conveniently headquartered in Bermuda as a contrivance to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes. While at Tyco, Flanigan liaised with tainted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his Greenberg Traurig law firm.
July 29, 2005 -- Ex-GOP Senator Warns Bush administration planning to fire Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as US Attorney for Chicago. The Chicago Tribune is reporting today that former Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who championed current CIA leak Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for appointment as US Attorney for Chicago in Sept. 2001, is warning that because of the U.S. Attorney's high profile criminal investigations of former GOP Gov. George Ryan and Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, he may not be reappointed to his post when his four year term expires in late October. If Bush fails to nominate a replacement and Fitzgerald is not renominated, he will be able to serve as US Attorney until a replacement is named. It may not be coincidental that the Grand Jury investigating top White House officials for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent will also expire in October if it is not re-impaneled on a request by Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald. With the clock potentially running out for Patrick Fitzgerald, if there are indictments in the CIA leak, they will likely be issued within the next few months. Peter Fitzgerald, who is not related to the Special Prosecutor, believes that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, as the dean of the Illinois congressional delegation, will recommend to President Bush that Fitzgerald not be reappointed as U.S. Attorney. It is no secret that top Illinois Republicans, as well as the Daley political machine, are gunning for Patrick Fitzgerald. Daley has been a major supporter of Bush's foreign policy who joined the GOP in criticizing Illinois Democratic Senator Richard Durbin for his remarks about the interrogation tactics used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It is doubtful Patrick Fitzgerald would be kept on as Special Prosecutor by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales if he is rejected by the White House for a second term as US Prosecutor -- a decision that would be seen as a loss in confidence in Fitzgerald by the Bush administration. The recent resignation of Patrick Fitzgerald's friend, career Justice Department prosecutor James Comey, as Deputy Attorney General -- and Fitzgerald's immediate supervisor -- is also a warning sign that the Bush administration is growing uncomfortable with the direction of Fitzgerald's investigation. Comey is to be replaced by Timothy E. Flanigan, a conservative GOP political hack and a Federalist Society colleague of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts. Flanigan, along with Roberts, was a member of the 2000 Florida GOP recount team. Flanigan was later the general counsel for the scandal-plagued Tyco International Ltd., which is conveniently headquartered in Bermuda as a contrivance to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes. While at Tyco, Flanigan liaised with tainted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his Greenberg Traurig law firm.
DIPLOMATIC CABLES
DIPLOMATIC CABLES
DIPLOMATIC CABLES 07/30/2005
calipari1.jpg (5297 bytes)
Did Calipari know too much about "third level" control of terrorist groups?
nejad.jpg (2979 bytes)
Ahmadinejad did not wear a beard in 1979.
Cambone.jpg (3528 bytes)
Pentagon Intelligence Chief Stephen Cambone. Is he running a vigilante team from Pentagon that's masquerading as FBI and CIA agents?
airport.jpg (2390 bytes)
A number of US military-contractor incidents have taken place in and around Baghdad International Airport.
WASHINGTON, DC AND TASHKENT -- July 30, 2005 -- As first reported here on July 8, relations between Washington and Tashkent finally boiled over after evidence that Pentagon special operations teams were involved in the Islamist revolt against President Islam Karimov's government in the town of Andijan on May 17. On July 29, Tashkent formally evicted the United States from its airbase at Karshi-Khanabad, also known as "K2." The Pentagon was given 180 days to evacuate all personnel, aircraft, and equipment from the base, which had been used by the United States since the Afghan war broke out following 911. The State Department was apparently blindsided by the abrupt Uzbek decision. It planned to send a diplomat to Tashkent on August 2 to negotiate the base's future. However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had already decided to scrap K2 after he secured continued basing rights in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Uzbek media has been abuzz with revelations that Pentagon special operations teams secretly met in Afghanistan with Tohir Yoldashev and members of his Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a group the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization allied to "Al Qaeda." The meetings were reported to have occurred before and after the Andijan revolt, which was blamed on IMU forces. The US-IMU meetings in Afghanistan were also referenced in an article in Asia Times by India's former ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey, M. K. Bhadrakumar.
The Uzbek government obviously believes the Pentagon has been dealing with terrorist groups and decided to deny the Americans a base from which they might be using to foment Islamist terrorist operations in Uzbekistan and in surrounding countries.
DIPLOMATIC CABLES 07/30/2005
calipari1.jpg (5297 bytes)
Did Calipari know too much about "third level" control of terrorist groups?
nejad.jpg (2979 bytes)
Ahmadinejad did not wear a beard in 1979.
Cambone.jpg (3528 bytes)
Pentagon Intelligence Chief Stephen Cambone. Is he running a vigilante team from Pentagon that's masquerading as FBI and CIA agents?
airport.jpg (2390 bytes)
A number of US military-contractor incidents have taken place in and around Baghdad International Airport.
WASHINGTON, DC AND TASHKENT -- July 30, 2005 -- As first reported here on July 8, relations between Washington and Tashkent finally boiled over after evidence that Pentagon special operations teams were involved in the Islamist revolt against President Islam Karimov's government in the town of Andijan on May 17. On July 29, Tashkent formally evicted the United States from its airbase at Karshi-Khanabad, also known as "K2." The Pentagon was given 180 days to evacuate all personnel, aircraft, and equipment from the base, which had been used by the United States since the Afghan war broke out following 911. The State Department was apparently blindsided by the abrupt Uzbek decision. It planned to send a diplomat to Tashkent on August 2 to negotiate the base's future. However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had already decided to scrap K2 after he secured continued basing rights in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Uzbek media has been abuzz with revelations that Pentagon special operations teams secretly met in Afghanistan with Tohir Yoldashev and members of his Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a group the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization allied to "Al Qaeda." The meetings were reported to have occurred before and after the Andijan revolt, which was blamed on IMU forces. The US-IMU meetings in Afghanistan were also referenced in an article in Asia Times by India's former ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey, M. K. Bhadrakumar.
The Uzbek government obviously believes the Pentagon has been dealing with terrorist groups and decided to deny the Americans a base from which they might be using to foment Islamist terrorist operations in Uzbekistan and in surrounding countries.
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