From The NY Times
Editorial

To hear the nation’s top economic officials tell it, the worst effect of the reckless mortgage lending during the housing bubble is not mass foreclosures, bankruptcies, investor losses or credit seizures. It is the possibility that the turmoil could lead to new regulation.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. has inveighed against a “rush” to regulation following the mortgage meltdown, and two Treasury under secretaries, writing recently in The Financial Times, criticized calls for “immediate” regulation.

There is nothing sudden about the push for regulatory reforms. Consumer advocates have been warning for years about unfair and deceptive lending that has taken place in plain view of do-nothing regulators. All along, they have presented detailed analyses and recommendations for regulatory action. And yet, Mr. Paulson has dismissed even the suggestion that a lack of regulation may have precipitated today’s financial turmoil, saying that “history says it’s very difficult for policy to keep up with innovation.” His under secretaries chalked up the current mess to “benign” market conditions that bred “complacency” and impaired “discipline.”

That’s all way off. Turning a profit by making rotten loans to uncreditworthy borrowers — ruining families and neighborhoods in the process — requires a lot more creativity than selling the Brooklyn Bridge to a gullible immigrant. But it is hardly the kind of innovation we want to encourage. Financial bubbles are not benign. And “undisciplined” is inapt, to put it politely, to describe lender behavior that ranged from amoral to deceptive, predatory and fraudulent — and that was enabled by bankers and investors at the other end of the transactions.

Read more Rules

From The Baltimore Sun
Editorial

The U.S. is outsourcing its food supply. Imports have nearly doubled since 2001, and the big growth is not in foods that don’t grow here - coffee, for instance, or bananas - but in crops that are American staples. The change raises questions about food safety, and about the wisdom of entrusting the nation’s food security to overseas producers.

Consider garlic. The U.S. is one of the world’s major garlic growers. It is also an important exporter of garlic. Yet American imports of garlic have been skyrocketing. From 38 million pounds in 1997, the U.S. imported 176 million pounds last year. Imported fresh garlic has more than tripled its share of the U.S. market, now accounting for 55.6 percent of sales.

Over the same period, the value of U.S. garlic production has fallen by more than a third, and the acreage devoted to garlic has dropped by nearly a quarter. American garlic growers are losing out to a supplier who can charge half what they do - China.

And garlic is just one example of the offshoring of American nutrition. About 20 percent of the food consumed here is now imported (80 percent of the seafood). And those numbers are trending in one direction only - up. A Mexican worker gets only $6 a day - but a Chinese worker earns just $2. The math is easy to do.

Can Americans trust Chinese garlic? Port inspections won’t be enough, because the Food and Drug Administration is woefully ill-equipped to handle that. The FDA wants to prod importers to institute verifiable safe practices at Chinese (and other) producers - which is a sensible idea. It’s a practice that has gone a long way toward improving the safety of food from Mexico.

Read more Plowed Under

From Salon
By Michael Scherer

A powerful group of conservative Christian leaders decided Saturday at a private meeting in Salt Lake City to consider supporting a third-party candidate for president if a pro-choice nominee like Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination.

The meeting of about 50 leaders, including Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who called in by phone, took place at the Grand America Hotel during a gathering of the Council for National Policy, a powerful shadow group of mostly religious conservatives. James Clymer, the chairman of the U.S. Constitution Party, was also present at the meeting, according to a person familiar with the proceedings.

“The conclusion was that if there is a pro-abortion nominee they will consider working with a third party,” said the person, who spoke to Salon on the condition of anonymity. The private meeting was not a part of the official CNP schedule, which is itself a closely held secret. “Dobson came in just for this meeting,” the person said.

The decision confirms the fears of many Republican Party officials, who have worried that a Giuliani nomination would irrevocably split the GOP in advance of the 2008 general election, given Giuliani’s relatively liberal stands on gay unions and abortion, as well as his rocky marital history. The private meeting was held Saturday afternoon, during a lull in the official CNP schedule. Earlier in the day, Vice President Dick Cheney had traveled to Utah to deliver a brief address to the larger CNP gathering. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also addressed the larger group.

Read more BlackBall

From The New Yorker
By Seymour M. Hersh

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Read more Shifting Targets

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grabbed attention this past week for his “defiant” posture towards the United Nations over Iran’s nuclear program and his asinine comments at Columbia University on the absence of homosexuality in his home country.

As usual, any legitimate points Ahmadinejad may have made were lost or drowned out in the uproar over his more controversial remarks.

But what may be more revealing than what the speeches tell us about him as a man, or even about the worsening tensions in U.S.-Iran relations, is what the reaction to his visit says about the state of democratic discourse in America.

In a replay of the hate-filled hysteria over Iraq’s Saddam Hussein that swept the nation in fall 2002, the U.S. political and media establishment lashed out without restraint against the Iranian president.

The one-sided condemnations of Ahmadinejad also contrasted with the uncritical praise for George W. Bush after his UN speech on Sept. 25, urging the UN to more aggressively promote human rights and oppose authoritarian regimes around the world.

Read more Authoritarianism

From The Independent UK
By Rupert Cornwell

These days, George Bush is so unpopular that even the Republican candidates seeking to succeed him dare not speak his name. But the great lesson imparted by current US politics is that, however enfeebled, a President with a veto is more than a constitutional match for his foes.

For proof, look at the Iraq war. Public disenchantment with that disastrous venture was the reason the Democrats recaptured Congress last November. Ten months on, Mr Bush’s approval ratings have sunk even lower. But what have Democrats managed to achieve with all their huffing and puffing? Zero. They haven’t been able to put the slightest brake on the US war machine.

This impotence has many reasons. The mess that Mr Bush has created is such that there are no simple answers any more. Democrats dread opening themselves up to charges that they are letting down the troops. Most important, however, they don’t have the votes – not the 60 needed in the Senate to break a filibuster, still less the two-thirds majority of 67 to override a presidential veto. The long-term results of the “surge” in Iraq are debatable. At home, however, it’s worked wonders as a short-term political weapon by persuading enough Republicans to stick with their President – at least until a bemedalled General David Petraeus returns to Capitol Hill in March to deliver his next progress report.

So the waste continues. “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” the Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen once said, apropos the Reagan deficits of the Eighties. In the case of Mr Bush and Iraq, read not billions, but hundreds of billions.

Read more Out of America

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Some of you guys are jerks.

No, I’m not talking about you, dear reader, whose erudition and class I’ve always admired. And you smell good, too.

But some of you other guys are some seriously preliterate knuckle draggers. Exhibit A would be the relatively new message boards on the Web site of that great metropolitan newspaper, The Miami Herald. Or at least it would have been, before management stepped in a few weeks back, began policing the boards more closely and put up a notice asking people to keep their comments on-point.

Before that, the message boards, theoretically a place where readers engage in robust debate on articles and commentaries in the paper, were a sewer of sexist, racist, pornographic crudity. For instance, a story on Shaquille O’Neal’s divorce engendered an exchange on the basketball star’s probable penis size. A story on Cubans brought the “I Hate Hispanics” crowd out in force. A story about the search for a black suspected cop-killer begat a call for lynching. Which, in turn, inspired someone to respond, “Bleep the police and all of you white racist folk.” Yadda yadda yadda.

Frankly, the only robust debate was the internal one among reporters and editors appalled at what one called “vandalism.” I even received e-mails from readers asking me to ask my bosses to clean up our message boards because they were stinking up the whole Internet.

Not that Mother Herald’s experience is unique. Other papers that provide online message boards — The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, for example — have reported the same problems.

Read more Free Speech

From The Washington Post
By David Ignatius

When a nation can’t solve the problems that concern its citizens, it’s in trouble. And that’s where America now finds itself on nearly every big issue — from immigration to Iraq to health care to anti-terrorism policies.

Let us focus on the last of these logjams — over the legal rules for conducting surveillance against terrorists. There isn’t a more urgent priority for the country: We face an adversary that would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans if it could. But in a polarized Washington, crafting a solid compromise that has long-term bipartisan support has so far proved impossible.

People who try to occupy a middle ground in these debates find that it doesn’t exist. That reality confounded Gen. David Petraeus this month. He thought that as a professional military officer, he could serve both the administration and the Democratic Congress. Guess what? It didn’t work. Democrats saw Petraeus as a representative of the Bush White House, rather than of the nation.

Now the same meat grinder is devouring Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence. He’s a career military intelligence officer who ran the National Security Agency under President Bill Clinton. As near as I can tell, the only ax he has to grind is catching terrorists. But in the vortex of Washington politics, he has become a partisan figure. An article last week in The Hill newspaper, headlined “Democrats question credibility, consistency of DNI McConnell,” itemized his misstatements and supposed flip-flops as if he were running for office.

Read more Logjam

From The LA Times
Editorial

On Sept. 10, 2001, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave a speech at the Pentagon on the need to combat “an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America.” The enemy wasn’t Russia, China or Al Qaeda. It was the Pentagon bureaucracy. Rumsfeld declared a crusade not merely to attack waste but to transform the military into a technologically superior fighting force that would achieve what no modern military ever had: corporate-style efficiency.

Alas, the dream of managing the government more like a business is central to some of the Bush administration’s most disastrous mistakes. It was at the heart of the decision to browbeat the generals into agreeing to invade Iraq with a “light footprint,” which allowed the insurgency to flourish. Contempt for the bureaucratic process doomed serious postwar planning — after all, governmental decision-making is political, collaborative and agonizingly slow, and the result is almost always a compromise that may avoid disaster but stifles innovation. To run the occupation of Iraq, President Bush chose a man who promised to make decisions like a CEO, which is why L. Paul Bremer III made the fatal mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army without consulting the cumbersome Washington bureaucracy. And corporate thinking about efficiency led to vastly expanding the outsourcing of functions traditionally performed by the military. The biggest beneficiary has been Blackwater USA, a private security firm with powerful political and personnel ties to an administration that has awarded it more than $1 billion in contracts since 2002.

Read more Business

From The Boston Globe
By Janine R. Wedel

If there is a quagmire in Iraq, it was created more than a decade ago when the United States instituted a flawed system governing the use of contractors to perform governmental functions. Now, despite Iraqi fury at Blackwater USA, some of whose employees are accused of fatally shooting Iraqis, Washington is so reliant on the firm that it dare not order it from the field.

The heavy dependence on private contractors in the military is relatively recent. In the Gulf War only 9,200 contractors supported 540,000 military personnel. The estimated 180,000 US-funded contractors now in Iraq (of which about 21,000 are Americans) outnumber the 160,000 US troops.

All too often this private army has been unmanageable and unaccountable, its interests dangerously divergent from those of the US and the Iraqi governments. The troubles exposed by the Blackwater debacle provide a glimpse into a much larger, systemic problem that pervades military, intelligence, and homeland security efforts alike.

The Bush administration came into office bent on privatizing as many government functions as possible and threw billions into the mix in its Iraq venture. It was changes in the contracting system, instituted during the Clinton administration, though, that transformed the contracting rules and undercut oversight, transparency, and competition.

Read more Shadow Army