United States News Digest
EIW Told You First: Memos Theft Is 'Electronic Watergate'
In issue #47, EIW's InDepth reported, "Plumbers Under Investigation in Cheney-Gate," referring to a series of reported thefts of confidential Senate memos, that Vice President Dick Cheney's agents were using to accuse the Democratic Senators of "partisanship," and thereby shutting down crucial investigations. But last week, one such "Memo-Gate" blew up in the face of Senate Judiciary chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the GOP, when Hatch was forced to reveal that his own staff member had engaged in file-theft by computer hacking. The investigation and discovery of the computer-file theft from the Judiciary Committee sets a precedent for the far more important case of file theftthe stealing of a staff memo from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
After Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats charged that Democratic staff memos, leaked to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, had been stolen from secured computer systems, committee chairman Hatch labelled the complaints as theatrics, used to divert attention from the content of the memos. "Whenever they get their hands caught in the cookie jar, then they start to attack the process," Hatch fumed.
But, on Nov. 28, the Washington Timesone of the newspapers that allegedly received the pilfered memosreported that Senator Hatch announced that one of his own staffers was put on leave in connection with hacking into the Democratic staff files on the Judiciary Committee computer. In addition, Hatch also said that a former Judiciary Committee staffer might be involved in the leak.
Then, also on Nov. 28, the Washington Post identified Miguel Miranda, who left the Judiciary Committee staff in February, to become a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, as someone who was circulating the pilfered Democratic memos. Miranda denies having physically been in possession of the memos, but he was quoted in mid-November, in the Washington Times and elsewhere, as having been circulating the memos and promoting them to discredit the Democrats for blocking Bush's judicial nominees.
Gingrich Economics Behind Medicare Looting
He's ba-a-a-ck! The gangrenous Newt Gingrich that you thought we'd gotten rid of back in the 1990s, has returned in the form of the newly passed Medicare bill (see next item), which represents the first step in the dismantling of assured medical insurance for the elderly in the U.S.A.
Gingrich economics, you'll recall, was a contract, a contract that gave you the "freedom" to starve, go without medical care, and go without a job. In that contract, the government refused to take responsibility for the general welfare, and you, the citizen, had to pay, and compete, for everything you got. That was the policy which Medicare, established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, was intended to put an end to, in order to provide security for senior citizens.
With the passage of the Medicare billfor which the Democrats presented no reasonable alternativethe intent of the original Medicare legislation has been reversed. What has been passed is a gigantic set of subsidies for pharmaceutical companies and HMOs, to help them "cherry-pick" the most lucrative clients among the elderly, and then dump the others on an increasingly insolvent Federal government.
The entire approach should be dumped, in favor of Lyndon LaRouche's call for opening public hospitals, and restoring the Hill-Burton approach of guaranteed health care for all. Anyone who voted for this Medicare bill is a Gingrichite, whether they like the name or not. And the only alternative is the one provided by LaRouche.
Medicare Bill Sent to Bush
The drive to privatize Medicare took a giant step forward, on Nov. 25, when the Senate voted 55 to 44 for the Medicare reform package.
The bill was muscled through the House, in the early morning hours of Nov. 22, when House leaders held open the vote on the conference report on the bill for three hours, instead of the customary 15 minutes, while votes were changed by crude arm-twisting and deal-making by the majority. This intervention was made necessary because some 20 conservative Republicans had voted against the bill as a "massive expansion" of the Medicare program, with its $400 billion prescription-drug program. So, for more than one hour, during which the vote should have been closed, the bill was actually losing by a vote of 218 to 216. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) and Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) had no intention of closing the vote until they succeeded in getting some of those recalcitrant Republicans to change their votes, which they finally succeeded in doing at about 6:00 the next morning.
Not surprisingly, Democrats were enraged. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif) declared, "We won it fair and square and they stole it by hook and crook." Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md) added, "We ... prevailed on this vote. Arms have been twisted and votes changed."
Senate Democrats were ready to sit back and let the bill sail through without a fight, but the behavior of the House GOP leadership caused Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass) to launch a filibuster against it, even though it was not clear he had the votes to stop the bill. Kennedy said, on ABC's "This Week," on Nov. 23, that he had told Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) he would drop his filibuster if the House took a re-vote on the bill. "In the House of Representatives," Kennedy said, "with this program that is supposed to be so good, why did they have to effectively abuse the rules?"
Kennedy's filibuster was defeated on Nov. 24, by a vote of 70 to 29, ten more votes than needed, but other Senators promised to bring the fight "to the ballot box." Besides subsidizing pharmaceutical companies to the tune of $139 billion over 10 years, the bill includes a 45% cap on the level of Federal revenues that can be used to fund Medicare. When Medicare spending reaches that arbitrary level, the program will be declared "insolvent," the budget will be capped, services will be cut and premiums will be increased. With tax revenues generally declining, it is likely that the program will exceed that limit within a few years, or less, of the bill's enactment.
Energy Bill Stopped in Senate
Seven Senate Republicans joined with 32 Democrats and one Independent on Nov. 21 to kill the Administration's Energy bill, by sustaining, by a 57 to 40 vote, a filibuster against the conference report (joint House/Senate version of the bill). Opponents of the bill complained about many of its provisions, but ignored the worst aspectthe repeal of the New Deal-era Public Utility Holding Company Act. Under the PUHCA, electric utilities were able to provide highly reliable, affordable, and universal electricity service, when regulatory agencies forced them to. The repeal of PUHCA turns electricity grids over to the "free market" where companies will decide to build additional capacity when it is "profitable" for them to do so. The bill also includes $20 billion in tax incentives to coal, oil, and natural gas producers, many of which reportedly helped Vice President Dick Cheney write the bill.
The provision that drew the most opposition, however, was the exemption put into the bill to exempt producers of the gasoline additive MTBE from liability for ground-water contamination. It drew together an unusual coalition of New York Democrats and New Hampshire Republicans to lead the filibuster against the bill. Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the MTBE provision "a disgrace," because it "chose the large oil companies over homeowners." Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) charged that the bill was "almost a gratuitous attack on the Northeast," because MTBE was mandated for use in the northeastern part of the country, where it is causing many problems, but is manufactured in Texas, which stands to benefit from the provision.
However, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, increasingly looked upon as the Senator in Cheney's pocket, used a parliamentary maneuver that allows him to recall a bill for further consideration by voting against it, in the hope that the two more votes for the energy bill could be found. But, the only way that this might happen, is if changes are made to the bill, to placate some of its opponents. Then, that would, in turn, require that the new bill go back to the House, which passed it on Nov. 18, to vote on the revisions. Frist's success is doubtful; Democratic Sen. Schumer vowed that the opponents of the bill "are going to stick together as a coalition. We are going to do our best [to see] that no one is picked off by giving one little thing, because this is a bad policy."
The earlier House action on the bill was accompanied by the GOP thuggery which has come to characterize House proceedings under House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). The leadership brought the conference report to the House floor only some 10 hours after the conference negotiators finished work on it, instead of waiting the three days called for by the House rules. Democrats charged that the Republicans negotiated the bill in secret, in exactly the same way that Vice President Cheney's 2001 energy task force functioned. "This is not just an outrageous abuse of the process," charged Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas), "it is an insulting attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people." But the bill passed the House by a vote of 246 to 180, with that at least two dozen Democrats joined the Republicans.
CFR 'President Emeritus' Proposes Partitioning Iraq
Leslie Gelb, a former editor of the New York Times, proposes in a Nov. 25 Times op-ed, a "Three-State Solution" for Iraq, which is not much different from the most fanatical neo-con proposals to pull out of the Sunni Triangle and "flatten it." Gelb doesn't go quite that far in print, but does call for dividing the country into Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni sections (this is "natural," he says, claiming that a unified state was forced on them by the British), and then pulling all U.S. economic aid and military forces out of the Sunni Triangle, which would free U.S. troops "from fighting a costly war they may not win." Then, American officials could "wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences."
Gelb, who is now president emeritus of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, writes that President Bush's new strategy of transferring power quickly to the Iraqis, and the alternatives posed by his critics, all "share a fundamental flaw," which is that they commit the U.S. "to a unified Iraq, artificially and fatefully made whole from three distinct ethnic and sectarian communities."
"Central Iraq is largely without oil," writes Gelb, "and without oil revenues, the Sunnis would soon become poor cousins." Of course, liberal imperialist Gelb knows that "without power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble," so, as his mentors in London did with India and Pakistan, he says we must help the Kurds and the Shi'ites within central Iraq move north or south. "This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the U.S. would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.... Washington would have to be very hard-headed and hard-hearted, to engineer this break-up, But such a course is manageable, even necessary."
GOP To Ram Through Omnibus Appropriations Bill
The long-rumored omnibus appropriations bill finally emerged on Nov. 25, when House Appropriations Committee chairman Bill Young (R-Fla) filed a conference report merging the seven remaining appropriations bills into one. As has become characteristic of the legislative process in the 108th Congress, the conference report includes changes in language and provisions that were not voted on by either the House or the Senate, and has removed provisions that were widely supported in both chambers.
Democrats denounced the package when it was released, and charged that it was made up of backroom deals that were made to placate the White House. Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc), ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee noted that, rather than the engaging the Constitutional legislative process, conference negotiators "disregarded the will of members of both Houses, went into a back room, and decided on their own, without consulting anybody but themselves and the White House, that they were going to cut the cards a different way and deal a new hand to everyone."
Two major changes have infuriated both the House and the Senate: the media ownership limits ruling; and changes in the labor rules that would eliminate overtime pay for some 8 million workers.
The conference report raised the media ownership limit from 35% to 39%, even though the Senate had addedand passedan amendment to the Commerce, Justice, State Department, and Judiciary appropriations bill setting the limit at 35%, in response to the June ruling of the Federal Communications Commission raising the limit to 45%. The House had also approved the 35% media ownership limit, on a motion to instruct the conferees on the bill.
Opposition has also been provoked over the removal of language in the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Departments funding bill that prohibits the Labor Department from implementing new overtime work rules that would have the effect of making up to 8 million workers, who are currently eligible for overtime pay, ineligible. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Penn), the chairman of the Labor-HHS appropriations subcommittee, practically admitted, in a floor speech, that he was blackmailed into agreeing to remove the prohibition in the face of a threat to cut $4 billion out of the bill.
The House and Senate return from their Thanksgiving break on Dec. 8-9, to take up the omnibus bill, but, at this point, it is anybody's guess as to whether or not it can be passed in its present form.
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