United States News Digest
Congressional Report Shows Cheney Lied About Halliburton Links
A new report from the Congressional Research Service by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) confirms that Vice President Dick Cheney receives Halliburton deferred salary and stock options. Therefore, Cheney lied Sept. 14, that he has no "financial interest" in Halliburton. The following is taken from a press release today, from the office of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.):
"Senator Frank R. Lautenberg released a CRS Report today that confirms that receiving deferred salary and holding stock options in a corporation does constitute a 'financial interest' under Federal ethics standards. This finding directly conflicts with statements released by the Vice President's office after it was revealed that the Vice President continues to receive deferred salary from Halliburton and holds 433,333 Halliburton stock options. The controversy arose when Vice President Cheney made the following statement on the September 14th edition of Meet the Press:
"'And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years.'
"After the Vice President was confronted with information to the contrary, his office continued to deny any financial tie, arguing that by taking out an insurance policy on the deferred salary and assigning his after-tax proceeds from the sale of unexercised options to charity, a financial interest no longer existed. The CRS Report explicitly rejects this dubious line of reasoning, finding that financial ties continue despite those steps."
The new report also addresses the issue of the President and Vice President both being exempt from the enforcement of ethics lawsbecause it might interfere with their Constitutionally mandated performance of their duties. But the Lautenberg release reports: "The Constitution provides its own remedies against the President and Vice President for ethical breaches."
Figures and specifics are provided by the CRS study, as reported by Lautenberg, for the dollar value of the Halliburton deferred salary payments to Vice President Cheney: $205,298 in 2001; and $162,392 in 2002.
Also there is an accounting of the stock options held by Cheney:
* 100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire 12-03-07
* 33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire 12-02-08
* 300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire 12-02-09/
"The Vice President's deferred compensation and stock option benefits are in addition to a $20 million retirement package paid to him by Halliburton after only five years of employment; a $1.4 million cash bonus paid to him by Halliburton in 2001; and additional millions of dollars in compensation paid to him while he was employed by the company."
In "an ethically untenable situation," Vice President Dick Cheney "should stop accepting Halliburton compensation while he is in office," demanded Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) on Sept. 23. Lautenberg also officially requested that the Governmental Affairs Committee hold immediate hearings into the contracts Halliburton has received from the Administration, supposedly for work in Iraq, as the value of its large no-bid contract has ballooned to $1.25 billion. "Congress has the responsibility to look into this immediately, before more taxpayer money is placed in Halliburton's bank accounts," he said. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) opportunistically co-signed the request in a Sept. 23 letter to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me), chairman of the Committee.
Plan To Call Up Army Reserves Angers Military Families
The U.S. Army's decision to keep its reservists in Iraq for 12-month tours has sparked a growing movement of protests among the families of those deployed. Websites, created by families of deployed soldiers, are springing up, gathering petition signatures demanding that President Bush bring the troops home. The wife of a deployed soldier in the Michigan National Guard is reporting that three-quarters of his unit are planning to quit as soon as they return home from their tours, which could be four months longer under the new policy.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) is threatening to put on hold the nomination of James Roche as Army Secretary, if the policy is not changed. Nelson is warning that if National Guardsmen are taken away from their families and jobs for extended periods of time, re-enlistment rates will suffer. An 1,800-man regiment of the Florida National Guard was activated in December and has been in Iraq since April. Some officials are even warning that the stress and strain on the Guard and Reserves could break the system which augments the active-duty force in times of emergency.
Islamic U.S. Army Officer Arrested
U.S. Army officer of Islamic faith who had counselled al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested in early September by FBI agents in Jacksonville, Florida, as he deplaned from a military charter from Guantanamo. Capt. James J. Yee, a convert to Islam, and a 1990 West Point graduate, was interrogated by Federal agents for two days in Jacksonville, then transferred to the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is being represented by two Army lawyers. The Army has charged him with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage, and failure to obey a general orderand is said to be weighing charges of treason. However, a law enforcement source told the Washington Times on Sept. 23 that it was not the Army, but "the highest levels of government" that made the decision to arrest Yee.
The Times also reported that the specifics of the allegations against Yee could not be learned.
After 9/11, Yeeone of 17 Islamic chaplains in the U.S. Armywas the subject of numerous press articles and interviews, in which he spoke on behalf of traditional Islam, repudiating the terrorist attacks as prohibited by Islamic law. He joins U.S. citizens Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padillatwo high-profile "enemy combatants" already under detention at the Charleston brig.
Hurricane Isabel Damage Shows Necessity of LaRouche's California Pilot Project
The lesson for Washington, D.C., and its Hurricane Isabel electricity/water outages: reregulate and re-hire a full utilities workforce to 'make the system work,' until a better one is built. These are specifications from the new LaRouche in 2004 presidential campaign pamphlet, "Return to SanityMake California the Pilot Project." The Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area still has extensive outages of electricity and water problems, the result not simply of being in the way of storms, but from the vulnerability of the deregulated utilities infrastructure base, and a severe cutdown in numbers of utilities workers.
As of the evening of Sept. 24th, power was still out to 476,700 Virginia electric customers statewide. One week after hurricane Isabel hit the region, 60,000 in the Washington DC area are still without power; traffic signals are still out; some schools are still closed; and power companies are saying it will still be several days before every household has electricity.
Neo-cons Push Air Traffic Control Privatization
The neo-cons running the Bush Administration have sneaked behind Congress' back to get the first privatization precedents into the U.S. Air Traffic Control system up until now, the biggest, safest, and best in the world.
On July 24, the Congressional Conference Committee, chaired by Rep. Don Young (R-Ak), under pressure from the Bush Administration, axed the language of bills passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Senate (56-41) and the House (418-8), which abandoned privatization forever. Instead, the Conference Committee limited the protection of the air traffic control system to only four years, and allowed privatization in 71 towers around the United States.
While the privatization proponents have put out the line that only "rural airports" are involved, in fact, the tower in Van Nuys, California the eighth-busiest tower in the United States in included.
Who Is In Howard Dean's Empty Suit?
by Anton Chaitkin, Courtesy of the New Federalist
The hype in the Wall Street-owned media promoting the Presidential candidacy of former Vermont Governor Howard Brush Dean III, peaked at the beginning of August.
Time and Newsweek both ran blazing Dean cover stories appearing Monday, Aug. 4 (issues dated Aug. 11). The Aug. 3 Washington Post had a big front-page Dean profile.
In the headlines, Dean criticized the Bush Administration's war policiesa political posture which he assumed for the first time in his life at the beginning of 2003.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is assured that Dean is a fiscal conservative. The Time story quoted Dean as saying that if welfare recipients "had any self-esteem, they'd be working," and later apologizing for the remark.
Learn to Live With Lower Wages
His recent anti-war rhetoric comes as something of a surprise for Vermonters. During his 1991-2002 governorship, Dean had no national or global focus, outside of "fiscal conservatism." He presided over the disappearance of the state's machine tool plants, and the decline of its dairy farming and lumbering. But Gov. Dean cut the state's budget. He praised post-industrial yuppie cottage enterprises and the potential of windmills, as the alternative to productive industry with its unpleasant high-paid union labor. Dean was such a darling of his Wall Street friends that they raised Vermont's bond rating, despite the gutted economy.
In his January 1996 State of the State Budget Address to the legislature, Dean said that "some workers are simply not earning as much as they used to.... Lower salaries mean less revenue for state programs." But his response to this national economic plunge was not to fight for an FDR-style economic recovery. On the contrary, Howard Dean said, "We must eliminate any potential deficit by the end of this fiscal year; balance our budget and live within our means; limit spending ... and establish a budget stabilization fund."
In 1995, Gov. Dean said that the way to balance the budget is for Congress to "cut Social Security," raise the Social Security retirement age to 70, cut defense, Medicare and veterans' pensions, while the states cut almost everything else.
But AP reports that when this was pointed out to Dean, on Aug. 6, 2003, he said that yes, he said this in 1995, but no longer thinks it necessary. After all, he now represents himself as "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
Yale, Bush, and Wall Street
Howard Brush Dean III comes from a long line of Wall Street Republicans, with a proximity to the Bush family which has been of little interest to the mass media.
His grandfather, the first Howard Brush Dean, graduated from Yale in 1918, and got into the personal circuit run by the Averell Harriman clique. Grandpa worked 1919-21 for the Guaranty Trust Company, the power base for financier George Herbert Walker, who organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919 and became the Harriman bank's chief executive. G.H. Walker's daughter Nancy was a bridesmaid at the wedding of grandpa Dean on April 10, 1920. The following year, Nancy Walker took part in her sister Dorothy's wedding to Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current President.
Also, Dean has boasted that President George W. Bush's mother's mother, Pauline Robinson, was a bridesmaid for Howard's mother's mother, in her Rye, N.Y. wedding.
Perhaps a transfer of power from Bush to Dean would be as natural asa succession within the royal family.
Yale University students, predominantly members of the Harriman/Bush secret Skull & Bones Society, organized Pan American Airways; many top Pan Am people lived on Florida's Jupiter Island with the Harriman and Bush families. A broker and stock exchange governor, grandpa Dean was vice president and director of Pan Am from 1943 to 1950, while Prescott Bush was a director of Pan Am.
Candidate Dean's father, Howard Dean, Jr., also a Yalie, worked for daddy's Pan Am and then expanded the family fortune as a stock broker.
Howard III, too, went to Yale. He got out of the Vietnam War draft due to a "bad back"then had a month of luxury skiing at Aspen, Colo. He started out on Wall Street, got bored, became a doctor, got bored again and went into politics.
Throughout his career as Lt. Governor and then Governor, Howard Dean turned over much of the political and economic decision-making to his own personal portfolio manager, Harlan Sylvester, of the Salomon Smith Barney investment firm. Sylvester today continues as the banking oligarchy's permanent economic controller of Vermont. He explained the necessity of Dean's dramatic tax cut for the wealthy in Dean's first year as Governor: "One-quarter of 1% of Vermonters pay 16% of state income taxes. That's 829 people, and a lot of them are clients of mine."
Which Wing of the Democrats?
Candidate Dean sometimes speaks of peace. But he also demands that President Bush "take a much harder line on Iran and Saudi Arabia." He claims that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya are funding Palestinian terrorists and fuelling terrorism throughout the world.
When he recently suggested, to please liberals, that the U.S. should not take sides between Israel and the Palestinians, and got criticism, Dean immediately backed off and said he didn't mean it.
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