Who is supporting the troops now?

The Bush administration's cynical use of the American military personnel was exposed by the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed, the failure of the VA to provide adequate medical treatment to thousands of returning veterans and the widespread use of Stop-loss that sends soldiers (over 81,000) who have fulfilled their military obligations back into combat against their will.

It turns out that returning vets are also having a hard to finding jobs, harder than for civilians of similar age and education.

The Washington Post reports that 18% of veterans recently back from tours of duty are unemployed. Twenty-five percent of those lucky enough to land a job earn less than $21,840 a year, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Is this what the Bush administration means by supporting our troops?

The Post article is attached.

Bear Stearns: privatized gains, socialized risks

The Bush administration and federal regulators are largely to blame for the nation's growing financial crisis. Their laissez faire practices fostered the housing bubble, putting people in homes they couldn't afford and allowed financial speculators to mask the risk by slicing and dicing loans to the point that they could no longer keep track of them while earning billions.

Alan Greenspan and other high-ranking Federal Reserve officials watched as the bubble inflated, or worse, blew more air into it by encouraging "innovative" lending schemes.

Once the housing bubble blew-up, the Bush administration has refused to help homeowners who, having been enticed into taking out loans they could not afford, are now facing foreclosure.

The President justified federal inaction less than a week before the Fed bailed our Bear Stearns, asserting that "one of the worst things you can do is overcorrect." Resurrecting Republican arguments against raising the federal minimum wage, he said that federal intervention "would make a complicated problem even worse - and end up hurting far more homeowners than we help."

The administration didn't harbor the same concerns about a federal rescue of the nation's financial elite, guaranteeing $30 billion for J.P. Morgan Chase' s firesale purchase of Bear Stearns, one of the industry's most aggressive and reckless investment firms.

A New York Times editorial, "Socialized Compensation," notes that: "The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad.

Compared to the cold shoulder given to struggling homeowners, the cash and attention lavished by the government on the nation’s financial titans provides telling insight into the priorities of the Bush administration. It’s not simply a matter of fairness, though...if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street’s wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.

The costs of such a lopsided system of incentives are by now clear. Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope...

...until bankers face a real risk of losing their shirts, they will continue blithely ratcheting up the risks to collect the rewards while letting the rest of us carry the bag when their punts go bad.

The editorial is linked here.

Iowa voters rebuke President Bush and apologist McIlheran

On New Years Eve, just days before the Iowa primary, Milwaukee Journal columnist, Patrick McIlheran , ridiculed the New York Times editorial board while alleging that Bush administration critics were utterly alienated from the country.

The record number of Democrats who turned out to caucus in Iowa— more than 239,000, compared with fewer than 125,000 in 2004 — and the surprising easy victory of Barack Obama was a stinging rebuke of the Bush administration and Mr. McIlheran's slander of the administration's critics.

The huge Democratic turn-out — by contrast, 108,000 Republicans caucused on Thursday — demonstrated the extent to which opposition to President Bush has energized the American people.

More than half of those who attended the Democratic caucuses (57%) were new participants.

Obama's victory over Hilliary Clinton, who entered Iowa as the Democratic front runner, also illustrates that voters are far more interested in a candidate promising change — as Mr. Obama was — than one citing experience, the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s appeal. Half of the record number of Democrats said their top factor in choosing a candidate was someone who could bring about change. Just 20 percent said the right experience, Mrs. Clinton’s key argument, was the main factor.

These results reflect the reality, despite Mr. McIlheran's silly protestations, that the Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years.

Currently, Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation.
Even an ideologue like Mr. McIlheran should know that the public prefers "alienated" Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins.

Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters who made up 20% of Iowa's Democratic caucus participants..

The turn-out in Iowa and surveys from the Pew Research Center, The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

Even before Iowa, Mr. McIlheran's "utterly alienated" critics had won control of the United States Senate and House of Representatives in 2006 elections by criticising the Bush administration's foreign and domestic policies?

Critics of the Bush administration are not alienated from their fellow citizens or their country.

Rather they are increasingly dissatisfied, as the New York Times editorial so eloquently put it, with what a reckless, handful of extreme neoconservative ideologues have done to our country and its principles. It is "..impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men (President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their neocon crowd) ... showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency...lawless behavior (by the United States government) has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001."

The record turn-out in Iowa and Mr Obama's victory are additional evidence that the American people are alienated from the Bush administration, its policies and apologists, like Mr. McIlheran, not their country.

Science manipulated to serve ideology!

Last week Dr. Carmona, the United States Surgeon General from 2002-2006, testified that the Bush administration had ordered him to mention President Bush's name three times on every page of every speech he delivered.

He was also instructed to withhold reports on important scientific and health issues ranging from stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues because the findings challenged Bush administration's policies.

White House officials even forced Carmona to delay for years and attempted to “water down” a landmark report on the dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke.

The political censure of Dr. Carmona's scientific work was not an aberration.

The Bush administration has consistently manipulated scientific data to serve its ideology and protect the interests of its political supporters.

In 2003 more than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement asserting that the administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.

During President Bush's first six years in office, he denied the reality of global warming, asserting that the science was not conclusive. NASA scientists and several officials at NASA headquarters and at two agency research centers reported that news releases on new global warming studies were revised by political appointees with no scientific background to play down definitiveness or risks. Remarkably, the science of global warming became conclusive after the democratic congressional victories in November 2006!

Ideological commitment and loyalty to the administration have driven policy in other areas as well. The White House made a commitment to a pro-life position on abortion and abstinence education the criteria for selecting officials to lead Iraq's reconstruction. At least seven Attorney Generals were fired for refusing to engage in overtly partisan political activity designed to help Republican candidates win elections.

This week we learned that another Bush appointee, Julie A. MacDonald, the former deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, had browbeat department biologists and habitat specialists and overruled their recommendations to protect a variety of rare and threatened species. She also violated federal rules by giving government documents to lobbyists for industries who had financial interests opposed to protecting wildlife and its habitat.

The Bush administration professes to abhor the heavy hand of government. Yet these apostles of laizze faire have consistently used the iron fist of the state to manipulate and suppress science. The White House has had a disciplined commitment to serving the extractive industries (gas, oil, timber and coal) and its campaign contributors, many of whom come from these very sectors. It has elevated short term economic goals over the long term health and welfare of the American people. In the process the current administration has undermined this nation's position of scientific and moral leadership in the world.