Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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After the pursuit of political and military adversaries became a poker game, it was only a matter of time before this…

From the AP:

The Pentagon (news – web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.

Two Democratic senators demanded Monday the project be stopped before investors begin registering this week. “The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said.

The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort “to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.” It said there would be a re-evaluation before more money was committed.

The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

A graphic on the market’s Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.

Now, would this one be filed under “Infinite Justice” or “Enduring Freedom”?

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Looks like Bush may be losing support among another traditionally Republican bloc of voters:

“He pats us on the back with his speeches and stabs us in the back with his actions,” said Charles A. Carter of Shawnee, Okla., a retired Navy senior chief petty officer. “I will vote non-Republican in a heart beat if it continues as is.”

“I feel betrayed,” said Raymond C. Oden Jr., a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant now living in Abilene, Texas.

Many veterans say they will not vote for Bush or any Republican in 2004 and are considering voting for a Democrat for the first time. Others say they will sit out the election, angry with Bush and Republicans but unwilling to support Democrats, whom they say are no better at keeping promises to veterans. Some say they will still support Bush and his party despite their ire.

While there are no recent polls to measure veterans’ political leanings, any significant erosion of support for Bush and Republicans could hurt in a close election. It could be particularly troublesome in states such as Florida that are politically divided and crowded with military retirees.

Registered Republican James Cook, who retired to Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after 24 years in the Air Force, said he is abandoning a party that he said abandoned him. “Bush is a liar,” he said. “The Republicans in Congress, with very few exceptions, are gutless party lapdogs who listen to what puts money in their own pockets or what will get them re-elected.”

…Since 1891, anyone retiring after a full military career has had their retirement pay reduced dollar for dollar for any Veterans Administration checks they get for a permanent service-related disability. However, a veteran who served a two-or-four-year tour does not have a similar reduction in Social Security or private pension.

A majority of members of Congress, from both parties, wants to change the law. A House proposal by Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., has 345 co-sponsors.

But it would cost as much as $5 billion a year to expand payments to 670,000 disabled veterans, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month told lawmakers that the president would veto any bill including the change.

The proposal is stuck in committee. A recent effort to bring it to the full House of Representatives failed, in part because only one Republican signed the petition.

“The cost is exorbitant. And we are dealing with a limited budget,” said Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee…

Good for these vets for deciding that the ones who want to deploy them for unjust and unnecessary warfare abroad and then welcome them back to the same shaft designated for every other working-class American are not on their side. The (first) Gulf War, and the official refusal to treat or even recognize the Gulf War Syndrome our soldiers suffered from exposure to our weapons, is only the most disturbing case. On a related note, one of the gratifying changes to see at the most recent round of anti-war protests was a departure from the pitfall too many on the left fell into in Vietnam: targeting the largely working class soldiers who carry out orders rather than the men who sit behind desks who send them. Looks like the latter group may be in for a comeuppance…

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From Human Rights Watch:

The acquittal by a Cairo appeals court of eleven men earlier convicted of consensual homosexual conduct is a step forward, but arrests and harassment of men who have sex with men continue in Egypt, Human Rights Watch said today. The appeals court overturned the convictions on July 20.

Zaki Saad Zaki Abd al-Malak, 23, was arrested by Egyptian vice squad officers in January 2002 when he was to meet a man with whom he had corresponded in an Internet chatroom. The photo, reproduced with his permission from his court file, is the one he had sent to the policeman who entrapped him.

“Men remain imprisoned in Egypt for private acts, in a continuing crackdown which violates international law,” said Scott Long, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “What is needed is to repeal the provisions of a law which invite repressive enforcement.”

The men were among sixteen who had been charged in February 2003, when police tapped the phone of a private apartment in the Giza district of greater Cairo after an informer reported that the owner was visited by other men. Police arrested the men whose recorded conversations suggested that they had engaged in homosexual acts. They were charged with the “habitual practice of debauchery,” punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment under Law 10/1961.

“Debauchery” [fujur] in the law is understood to criminalize consensual, non-commercial homosexual sex.

The men were tortured in detention. One told Human Rights Watch that they were held in isolation for fifteen days in the women’s section of the Giza police station; there, guards beat them three times daily, at every change of shift.

Thirteen men eventually appeared at trial; three more in hiding were tried in absentia. Only two were acquitted by the trial court April 17, 2003; the rest received sentences of from one to three and a half years’ imprisonment.

While overturning the sentences of the eleven men who appealed, Judge Mo’azer al-Marsary said, “We are so disgusted with you, we can’t even look at you. What you did is a major sin, but unfortunately the case has procedural errors and the court has to acquit all of you.”

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From the Financial Times:

Seventy-four per cent of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be willing to leave their homes in return for compensation from the Israeli government as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday. The poll’s findings contrast with the harsh rhetoric of settler leaders, who have vowed to resist strenuously any attempts to evacuate them. Under the US-backed road map to peace, Israel is supposed to freeze new building construction in the territories occupied since the 1967 war and dismantle unauthorized outposts erected since March 2001.

Ron HaCohen made the point last year that American Jews wanting to help Israeli settlers in the long run would be better off donating money to make up for the heavy financial incentives (only increased under Barak) that push the non-ideological majority of them into the occupied territories (sometimes directly from diaspora, as in the case of the 70 lower class Peruvians who last year were converted as a group to Judaism and shipped into the West Bank), and make it infeasible or impossible for them to leave. This is also the thrust behind Brit Tzedek v’Shalom’s “Call to Bring the Settlers Home,” which will collect signatures through this coming Yom Ha’atzmaut. This poll reinforces what has been clear for a long time – that it is, often, not settlers who force the hand of the government (as many on the left suggest), but rather the government that forces the hands of the settlers. Still, this poll, like the one demonstrating that the significant majority of Palestinian refugees would accept a settlement in which they are relocated, if they desire, somewhere else outside of the Green Line, is good news for those seeking an eventual just settlement for both sides.

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From an interview with Rep. Bernie Sanders:

And this is clearly an outrage for a dozen different reasons, but many librarians all over this country are worrying about the chilling impact it has on people’s reading habits. Is someone taking out a biography of Osama Bin Laden? Are you going to read a book on anarchy? Are you going to read books that might be controversial if you think the F.B.I. is going to know what is you are reading and that information will get out? So what I’m happy to say is we have the support of the American Librarians Association who have been very, very active on this issue. The book sellers all over America have come out and said, hey, the people of this country have the right to read what they want to read. If the F.B.I. has reason to believe somebody is a terrorist involved in terrorist activities, there are proper law enforcement mechanisms by which we can investigate those people. The good news is that I think yesterday’s victory, as you indicated, this is the first time that an aspect of the U.S.A. Patriot Act has come to the floor of the House and it was soundly, soundly defeated.

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From the Inquirer:

Police and Secret Service handling of anti-Bush and anti-war demonstrators at the president’s appearance in Philadelphia today resulted in lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union filing an emergency complaint in federal court.

The complaint on behalf of ACORN – Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — by ACLU legal director Stefan Presser contended authorities violated not just the demonstrators’ Constitutional right of free speech but a 1988 permanent court order resulting from federal and local authorities’ handling of demonstrators during the 1987 Constitution bicentennial celebration…

A few of us were there as legal observers this morning, and the wave Bush gave to the protesters as he drove by was…well, regal.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he’d been “kicked in the guts, slapped in the face.” Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.

The retaliation from Washington was swift.

“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.”

First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don’t ever talk to the media “on the record” — that is, with your name attached — unless you’re giving the sort of chin-forward, everything’s-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.

And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for…

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In this week’s New Haven Advocate, Paul Bass brings home the irony of Yale’s ONHSA- (Office of New Haven and State Affairs)sponsored picket of the Board of Aldermen against Naclerio’s (triumphant) resolution calling on Yale to pay its share in taxes to the city:

Yale’s managers were fired up. They couldn’t take no more. They sent a message to their compadres at the Chamber of Commerce calling for help. Dozens took to the streets. They brought signs. They massed in front of New Haven’s City Hall last week. And they marched.
What brought them out to protest?

New Haven’s high poverty?

The state of the schools?

A broken criminal justice system?

Nope. The managers and their comrades picketed on the evening of July 7 to protest New Haven government for being unfair to … Yale.

Another highlight of the article:

Last week’s events signaled “a cultural shift” at that office, observes Julio Gonzalez, executive assistant to Mayor John DeStefano and a Yale alum. “This has nothing to do with their mission. This is definitely different from what they’ve done in the past. Now it’s a lobbying arm.”

Bruce Alexander, a Yale vice president who heads the Office of New Haven & State Affairs, responds that the demonstration fits into the office’s mission: “to inform the community, out of a sense of respect for their opinion, of the facts, and not let those who seek to discredit us for their own narrow agenda define us in the community.”

Anyone who wants to check out Yale’s spin on the facts first-hand, visit Yale’s Office of Public Affairs here. Among their latest work: an ad “congratulating a list of employees who’d reached 25, 30, 35, 40, or 45 years of service at Yale and trumpeting Yale’s record as an employer. 47 of the employees honored on the list wrote back to the papers that had printed it:

We are proud to have been honored recently for our many years of service working at Yale University, but we were surprised to see our names in the Yale advertisement published by the Register claiming that Yale provides “strong job security, good wages, and excellent benefits.” We do not believe this to be true.

Throughout our years of working at Yale, we have fought and struggled with Yale’s administration to force them to provide what little they do give us. Nevertheless, our wages are still too low, we still face retirement into poverty, and Yale is still threatening the future security of our jobs.

A constant stream of misleading ads isn’t going to change this. It’s only going to change when Yale decides to treat us, and all its employees, with respect.

The most telling part of Bruce Alexander’s quote, however, would have to be the accusation that the unions have a “narrow agenda” – meaning perhaps that they value their workers’ wages over, say, Bruce Alexander’s. See less than a year ago, President Richard Levin wrote me and the rest of a student body a letter about his fear that the unions had “a broader agenda” – meaning that those thugs not only wanted good wages and benefits, but also wanted their neighbors in Fair Haven to be able to get jobs at Yale, their children to be able to attend adequately-funded schools, and their fellow workers to be able to organize. Maybe the polite thing would be for Yale’s leadership just to dictate to Union leadership at the negotiating table the precise acceptable breadth of their agenda, so as to avoid this Goldilock’s problem we seem to be having. But first they would have to come to the negotiating table…

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From the Times:

This island, it is safe to say, hates capital punishment. It has not had an execution since 1927. It outlawed the practice two years later and wrote this antipathy into its Constitution in 1952: “The death penalty shall not exist.” That is why a federal trial here, in which the Justice Department is seeking the execution of two men accused of kidnapping and murder, has left many Puerto Ricans baffled and angry.

Local politicians, members of the legal establishment, scholars and ordinary
residents have denounced the trial, now in its second week. They call it a betrayal of the island’s autonomy, culture and law, in particular its Constitution, which Congress approved in 1952 as part of the compact that created Puerto Rico’s unusual and frequently uneasy association with the United States mainland. Not even relentless daily testimony about the gory crime – the kidnapped man was shot and dismembered – has softened the outrage voiced by many here. . .

“If the people of Puerto Rico decide that capital punishment cannot be used, even in federal prosecutions, it is against the Compact of 1952,” Mr.Dávila Toro said. “How can I explain that my Constitution is not respected by the nation that teaches us how to live in a democracy?”

Wouldn’t want to let the colonies make the rest of us look bad, now would we?

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From the Guardian:

The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly revealed last night when the UN announced that while the US was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling living standards. The UN’s annual human development report charted increasing poverty for more than a quarter of the world’s countries, where a lethal combination of famine, HIV/Aids, conflict and failed economic policies have turned the clock back.

. . . The report said the 90s had seen a drop from 30% to 23% in the number of people globally living on less than a dollar a day, but the improvement had largely been the result of the progress in China and India, the world’s two most populous countries.

. . . The richest 1% of the world’s population (around 60 million) now
receive as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest
25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the
world’s poorest people. In 1820 western Europe’s per capita income was three times that of Africa’s; by the 90s it was more than 13 times as high.

With apologies to the Rav, looks like the bridge to the twentieth-first century was a narrow one…

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“It’s a pathetic thing that I’m considered the most progressive
candidate…” – Howard Dean, in an interview with the Progressive

Noam Scheiber on Howard Dean in The New Republic:
In an interview yesterday with The New York Times, Howard Dean complained that, “This is the most fiscally irresponsible president since Herbert Hoover. Republicans don’t balance budgets anymore. Democrats do.”

Huh? If memory serves, the reason Herbert Hoover was such a colossal failure as president was that he elevated the balanced budget to the level of fetish–insisting upon raising taxes and slashing spending even as the nation teetered on the edge of one of the worst economic disasters in history. So dogmatic was Hoover’s commitment to budget balance that even in June of 1932, near the depths of the Depression, he complained bitterly about the wastefulness of two bills adopted by Congress to provide unemployment relief, largely by funding public works projects…If Herbert Hoover was fiscally irresponsible, I’d hate to see Howard Dean’s idea of fiscal responsibility.

Indeed. Rhetoric like this is troubling from Dean precisely because as Governor his passion for balancing budgets so often outpaced his passion for social justice – it’s not a fluke that 10% of Vermont voted for a Progressive Party candidate to his left. I’d like to believe that Dean recognizes that Hoover’s devotion to balancing the budget was profoundly irresponsible national, social, and indeed fiscal policy. He likely does. But he’s yet to lay an ideological groundwork for why. This should give pause to those progressives – myself included – who would like very much to see Dean as the fierce critic, coherent alternative, and tested progressive he so often paints himself to be.