A compassionate conservative response to low wages

A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.

The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark.

Nearly 1.1 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001.

Prozac is pretty expensive when your employer doesn't provide health insurance.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Average US income down two years in a row; CEO pay way up

We'll take a break from Iraq war news today and look at things closer to home. George W. Bush plans to take credit for the "improving" economy in his run for election this year. Unfortunately while the economy has been improving for a few, it's been getting worse for most of us.

Americans' overall income shrank for two consecutive years after stocks plunged in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened in the since the current tax system was put in place during World War II, according to a published report Thursday.

The New York Times, reporting data from the Internal Revenue Service, said gross income reported to the agency fell 5.1 percent to $6.0 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, down from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average income fell even more, by 5.7 percent, and adjusted for inflation the decline was 9.2 percent.

The paper said the decline was due to a combination of the big fall in the stock market and the loss of jobs and wages in well-paying industries as the recession started in 2001.

The paper said before the recent drop the last decline posted for even one year was 1953.

The CEO's at the nation's largest companies saw their raises more than doubled in 2003 as the median raise handed out by S&P 500 companies to their top executives was 22.18 percent, according to a study by The Corporate Library.

The watchdog group said that stock options and awards of restricted stock drove the larger pay hikes. But most elements of the pay -- base salary, annual bonuses, restricted stock, long-term incentive payout, value realized from stock options and total compensation -- showed increases.

So much for a rising tide lifting all boats.

More on the Bush AWOL story

It turns out the records the Pentagon said were "accidentally destroyed" (see July 9 entry) were just misplaced; the Pentagon released them last Friday. You may have noticed the White House tends to release potentially embarrassing news on Fridays, when fewer people watch the news. And this story is probably another one they would like to see buried. The records, long sought by the Associated Press, show that Bush was not paid for his military service during the time in question.

Some of President Bush's missing Air National Guard records during the Vietnam War years, previously said to be destroyed, turned up on Friday but offered no new evidence to dispel charges by Democrats that he was absent without leave.

The Pentagon, which had announced two weeks ago that the payroll records had been accidentally destroyed, blamed a clerical error for previous failure to find them.

In May 1972, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign and, he has said, to perform his Guard service there for a year. But other Guard officers have said they have no recollection of ever seeing him there.

The documents released on Friday by the Pentagon included two faded computerized payroll sheets showing Bush was not paid during the latter part of 1972 and offer no evidence to place Bush in Alabama during the latter part of 1972.

It should be noted that Bush's Democratic challenger in this year's presidential election, John Kerry, not only bothered to show up for his military service but volunteered to go to Vietnam where he earned medals for bravery in combat.

Tony Blair admits more Iraq evidence exaggerated

Continuing the pattern of deception that has characterized the American and British attempts to justify invading and occupying Iraq, Tony Blair's government has belatedly admitted it grossly inflated the number of bodies already found in mass graves in Iraq.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded.

Their first trumped up reason for war now exposed, they need to find another one.

Gullible war planners did not expect insurgency

A former general admits that, in spite of warnings from the State Department, he and other planners of the Iraq war were surprised at the guerilla uprising against the US occupation, because they took the word of Iraqi exiles who were advocating for the invasion.

One of the nation's top generals during the invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) said Thursday that the insurgency took U.S. military leaders by surprise because they believed the assurances of Iraqi opposition groups and defectors that American forces would be welcomed.

Gen. John Keane, who served as the Army's vice chief of staff during the war and who has since retired, told the House Armed Services Committee: "We did not see it coming. And we were not properly prepared and organized to deal with it. . . . Many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be."

Keane said an insurgency in Iraq after the end of major combat was discussed during months of war planning but was not made a priority.

Testifying with Keane were two other retired Army officers, Col. Douglas Macgregor, who left the service last month, and Maj. Gen. Robert Scales.

All three retired officers portrayed an Army overtaxed by events in Iraq, as well as a National Guard and Reserve system bearing an unfair burden to support operations there and in Afghanistan.

A time honored custom of war: looting

Sensitive to accusations that the decision to invade Iraq was a desire to steal Iraqi oil, the United States agreed to an independent audit of how it was running the Iraqi oil industry after the invasion. The International Advisory and Monitoring Board release its audit yesterday, and determined that US corporations have cannot say how much Iraqi oil they have sold or what they were paid for it.

An audit of Iraq's oil revenues revealed a lack of adequate financial controls and an inability to get information on large non-competitive contracts, including one awarded to Halliburton, the board established to monitor Iraq finances reported Thursday.

The International Advisory and Monitoring Board on Iraq released an audit prepared by accounting firm KPMG, which cited concerns about an inability to track how much oil is being produced in Iraq and a lack of proper internal controls on the money being spent.

The board, which met Wednesday and Thursday in Washington, said it had been unable to gain access to audits already done by U.S. agencies on a number of noncompetitive contracts awarded for various Iraq reconstruction projects including one given to Halliburton to repair Iraq's oil production facilities.

Monitoring board members said L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the American-led occupation in Iraq, had assured them U.S. audits of the single-source contracts would be provided, but now they were being told legal issues had to be cleared up before the audits could be turned over.

The monitoring board said it was pressing U.S. authorities to provide a list of all noncompetitive contracts that had been awarded.

They may have to wait a while.

Pentagon says Bush's service records "accidentally" destroyed

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request for National Guard records relating to the missing eight months of George W. Bush's military service, the Pentagon announced yesterday that Bush's payroll records were "inadvertently" destroyed in 1996 or 1997 during an attempt to salvage "deteriorating" microfilm.

Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for Defense finance agency in Denver, said the destruction occurred as the office was trying to unspool 2,000-foot rolls of fragile microfilm. Mr. Hubbard said he did not know how many records were lost or why the loss had not been announced before.

Coincidentally, 1997 is the year a now-retired Texas National Guard officer says he overheard a conversation about destroying potentially embarrassing portions of Bush's service record and actually found some pages in the trash.

A former officer in the Texas National Guard said Thursday he once overheard a conversation in which there was a request to sanitize President Bush's Guard records during Bush's tenure as Texas governor.

Soon afterward, he said, he saw Bush's Guard performance review in a trash can. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War era.

Retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, who was then an adviser to the Texas adjutant general, who in that capacity serves as the commander of the state's National Guard, made the allegations.

He said that in 1997 he overheard Joe Allbaugh -- who was Bush's chief of staff at the time -- ask Guard commander Maj. Gen. Daniel James to gather Bush's files and "make sure there wasn't anything there that would embarrass the governor."

I don't know anything about Colonel Burkett, but I do know the Bush cartel has a long history of lying. Whom should we believe?

Cheney caught lying; lies again

Despite the conclusion by the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney is still continuing to insist that there was.

In an interview with CNBC, Cheney had said there "probably" was information about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission members did not learn during their 14-month investigation.

Yesterday the commission responded that they have no reason to think Cheney knows more than they do and they stand by their conclusion.

The Sept. 11 commission is standing by its finding that al-Qaida had only limited contact with Iraq before the terrorist attacks.

The 10-member, bipartisan panel issued a one-sentence statement Tuesday saying it had access to the same information as Vice President Dick Cheney, who suggested strong ties between ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

That assertion was one of the justifications the Bush administration gave for going to war with Iraq. In a preliminary report released last month, the Sept. 11 commission cited contacts between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden but said there was no "collaborative relationship."

Dick Cheney: pathological liar, or war-mongering scum? I report, you decide.