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Arizona Republicans have been worried about the integrity of the vote. The threat they’re facing isn’t touchscreen voting machines, irregularities in voter eligibility lists, or police intimidation when minorities go to vote. Nope. It’s undocumented immigrants. Those little brown-skinned people have been insinuating themselves into the voting booths and casting ballots— presumably for Democrats. They haven’t found any evidence for it yet—but they know it’s happening.

The problem has grown to such proportion in Arizona that they’re trying to get an initiative on the November ballot known as “Protect Arizona Now.” The Republican leaders promoting the initiative “believe that electoral fraud is rampant among undereducated, non-English speaking immigrants.” The initiative would require “all Arizonans to prove their citizenship to vote and to apply for state and local government services.”

But you’d think the Repugs would be safe from voter fraud in an internal party vote, where the only undocumented migrants for miles around are the ones that can be seen through the windows of the Republican conference rooms—manicuring the lawn. It turns out that Republicans are not even safe in their own home.

At a party conference in May, the Repugs were to elect three members to the Republican National Committee. Balloting was close, with the right-winger Pullen—one of the leaders of the “Protect Arizona Now” initiative—beating out the moderate Hellon with 289 votes to 284.

But questions about the election's validity moved the state party leadership to conduct an internal investigation. The investigation revealed that a few Pullen supporters voted more than once using other delegates' credentials. Overzealous partisans stuffed the ballot box in good ol' fashioned election chicanery.
....
The party's hired attorney reported that "the available evidence is sufficient to conclude that illegal voting likely took place in the election for national committeeman." He also wrote that "the evidence is sufficient to make an election challenge."

So what did the party leadership do about it? Investigate further? Hold a new election? Disqualify the tainted ballots and recount the votes? Not these “democrats.” They did nothing.

One of the party leaders said,

... the party electoral process was confusing and fraught with misunderstanding. He said it will be fixed next year.

Columnist Portillo asks,

What, was this the first time GOP activists cast votes? If it were a first-grade election for class president, confusion could be an acceptable excuse.

So when some GOP stalwarts commit electoral fraud, it's a misunderstanding. But if a non-citizen were to vote, that would be dishonest.

Liberals and leftists have for too long assumed a “level playing field” as they got their butts kicked year after year. They assumed the other side was playing by the same rules. No, folks. This is a game played mostly without referees. And when we resorted to the referees, as in the 2000 elections, it turns out that even the referees are biased.

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.... Kerry will return the federal government to the principle of paying for new initiatives without increasing the deficit. Known as "pay-as-you-go," these common-sense budget rules were instrumental in creating the economic growth of the 1990s but were quickly abandoned by the Bush administration. In addition to reintroducing "pay-as-you-go," Kerry will take steps to ensure discretionary spending - excluding defense and homeland security - does not grow any faster than inflation.
...
Later this afternoon, Kerry is scheduled to discuss his budget framework with members of the Business Roundtable. He will be joined at this meeting by former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. [emphasis added]

If you really want to know what to expect for the economy in the next four years, should Kerry win (and he will), you’d better tune in to "Wall $treet Week" on PBS, then start reading the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and maybe Bloomberg.com.

I know, I know. You don’t own any stocks and the last bond you owned was a bail bond. The headlines are puzzling, the writing is as dry as the Sahara, and why should you care?

The reason you should care is that the folks being discussed and the corporations they control are going to have far more to do with the direction this country takes than the President or Congress. That’s, of course, because they own the President and Congress.

Those who should know tell me that "Wall $treet Week" can be absolutely hilarious when viewed on a psychedelic. Taken alone, Karen Gibbs, one of the moderators, is worth the price of admission. She has this way of mumbling that looks and sounds as if she’s trying to keep her dentures from falling out.

So here I was, tuned in last Friday night, listening to a Wall Street panel discuss the Democratic Convention, when I heard this:

Colvin [the panel moderator]: I didn't hear any of the network commentators mention this, but during Kerry's acceptance speech, seated in the audience next to his wife, on one side of him was John Edwards. On the other side, on her right hand was Robert Rubin, who of course was Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration. Mark Zandi, would the markets like to see Bob Rubin in a Kerry administration?

This is the kind of talk that can bring thousands of capitalists to the edges of their seats. There’s a lot of meat in this question.

First, Colvin is correct that the network commentators didn’t point out the seating arrangement. In fact, the only other outlet I’ve discovered that noted the seating arrangement was Bloomberg.com.

Watching the speech in the hall, Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was flanked by Edwards and Robert Rubin, chairman of Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee. Rubin encouraged President Bill Clinton to push deficit-reduction legislation in 1993 and served as his Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999.

The seating arrangement wasn’t mentioned by the popular media because it’s what is known as “a signal to the markets.” You’re not supposed to know, much less care, about such things. 1

Second, “Rubinomics” is so hot on Wall Street that just a few weeks ago a number of media hacks were actually speculating that Rubin was going to be Kerry’s choice for Vice President.

But back to "Wall $treet Week,"

COLVIN: Kevin Hassett [right-wing thinktank-head], you've spent a lot of time in Washington. You've worked on a campaign or two. Robert Rubin seated next to Teresa Heinz Kerry doesn't happen by chance at a political convention. What does it mean?

HASSETT: I would have to say that what it means is that Kerry's trying to signal that even though he's promised things that don't add up and that would vastly increase the deficit, what he really is is a deficit hawk of the Rubin style, and that really what's going to happen after he's elected is he's going to give up those promises and pursue deficit reduction first.

The subtext of the panel talk was that Kerry is going to win. I mean, here’s a Bush supporter from the American Enterprise Institute saying “after he’s elected.” Now, I know. I know that sentence doesn’t say that Kerry will be elected. But on the other hand, Hassett might easily have picked a more skeptical expression, such as, “if he’s elected.”

Poor Bush. Wall Street has decided he's toast, and there ain’t a damned thing he can do about it. The only things he's still got going for him are ignorance and fear.

But all this economic talk has got Ryan Lizza at the New Republic worried,

[T]he left has good reason to be worried about Kerry's first 100 days, at least on economic policy. This afternoon CNBC brought together a small group of journalists over at the Old State House for a luncheon with Kerry's senior economic advisers. Bob Rubin and Roger Altman ... were the main speakers, but also in attendance were Gene Sperling, Clinton's chief economic adviser, and Jason Furman, Kerry's economic policy director. The message from Altman and Rubin was that Kerry is a passionate advocate of Clintonomics—especially an emphasis on deficit reduction and the return of congressional spending rules. Altman made a point of noting that like no other politician he knows, Kerry has publicly said he would trim some of his spending priorities back to achieve a fiscally conservative budget.
...
Asked about why corporate America sometimes fears a Democratic administration, Rubin told a story about how Clinton once confided to him that ... some in the business world are always scared that somewhere in the White House "a liberal was going to jump out of the closet." ... [T]he message to the media—and perhaps the warning to the left—was that in a Kerry White House, on economic policy there won't be any liberals hiding in the closets. However, I think there will probably be a lot more knocking on the front door. [emphasis added]

Knock-knock.

Have you ever had an airline make an unscheduled stop to pick you up? I thought not.

KansasCityChannel.com has a little survey of your opinion on this. Go vote. It's fun, and we all need to get in practice for November.

Le monde diplomatique has just published a sobering review by Ignacio Ramonet of China’s development "Chine, megapuissance," which I’ve excerpted. It’s not available in English, but is available in Spanish.

China has become a Wonder of the World in exports:

In the euphoria of initial globalization, [China] was depicted as a veritable windfall for shrewd investors by the hundreds of companies that offshored their factories there (after having dismissed millions of wage-earners). Thanks to the system of “special economic zones” set up along its maritime front, it quickly became a phenomenal exporting power. And it took the lead among world exporters in clothing and textiles, shoes, electronics and toys. Its products invaded the world, particularly the U.S. market, bringing with it a huge imbalance: in 2003, the American commercial trade deficit with Peking reached $130 billion! [emphasis added]

The money pouring in from the U.S. has raised the standard of living for millions of Chinese and allowed the Chinese government to invest in the country’s infrastructure.

This exporting frenzy was to provoke a spectacular takeoff of growth which, for two decades, has surpassed 9% each year! This “democratic market communism” also brought with it, in millions of homes, an increase in buying power and standard of living, and has encouraged the rise of a genuine Chinese capitalism. The state, in the same spirit, launched into a forced-march modernization of the country, increasing the construction of its infrastructure: ports, airports, highways, railways, bridges, dams, skyscrapers, stadia for the Olympic Games in Peking in 2008, facilities for the World’s Fair in Shanghai in 2010, etc.

(The article fails to mention that this influx of cash is also allowing China to hasten its military development.)

The internal development has in turn made China a gargantuan consumer—

... Last year it was the top buyer in the world of cement (importing 55% of the world production), coal (40%), steel (25%), nickel (25%) and aluminum (14%), and the second largest importer of oil, after the United States.

The demand, of course, has affected world prices.

These purchases have caused a price explosion in the markets—particularly in the petroleum markets. Admitted to membership in the World Trade Organization in 2001, China is now one of the great economies of the world—the sixth, to be precise....

If China continues at this pace, by 2041 it will surpass the United States and become the top world economic power, which will have major geopolitical consequences. It also means that by 2030, its energy consumption will equal that of the United States and Japan today, and that—not having enough petroleum on hand—it will be forced between now and 2020 to double its nuclear capacity and to construct two nuclear power stations per year for 16 years.

And there will be environmental consequences.

... China—which ratified the Kyoto protocol—will leave the second tier of polluters of the planet, which it presently occupies, to move to the first tier. It will then release colossal quantities of greenhouse gasses that will aggravate the climatic change underway.

The article ends by raising perhaps the most important question facing all of us.

How to lift billions of people out of the distress of underdevelopment without plunging them into a model of production and “Western-style” consumption, disastrous for the planet and fatal for humanity as a whole?

This is a question for capitalism itself. Don’t expect any solutions from George Bush or this Congress.

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With the recent Senate report on intelligence and with the subsequent debate over the reorganization of the intelligence services in the news, this series of posts may be of topical as well as general interest.

William Karel is not well-known in the U.S. In fact, a Google search of his name turns up a plethora of links in French, Dutch, German but very few in English. I discovered him by accident while searching for some CIA-associated names.

Karel is a Swiss documentary filmmaker, and his most recent foray into the news came thanks to his film “Le monde selon Bush”—“The World according to Bush.”

According to the Hollywood Reporter,

When "Fahrenheit 9/11" was selected for the Cannes film festival, another documentary about George W. Bush was waiting in the wings in case Michael Moore's film wasn't ready in time. "The organizers were keen to include our film in the Official Selection but felt it was politically incorrect to have two anti-Bush documentaries at Cannes," says Jean-Francois Lepetit, whose Flach Film produced "Le monde selon Bush."

“The World according to Bush” premiered on French television in June and has been released in French theaters.

But it’s about a previous documentary “CIA: Guerres secrètes” or “CIA: Secret Wars,” produced last year, that I am writing. It’s a three-part film, Part III covering the years from Gulf War I to the lead-up to the Iraq war, the period 1990-2001.  [Note: I haven't yet located a vendor for the film, though it's my understanding that it's available. As soon as I've found one, I'll add the information.]

Karel says of his film,

I had already made a film on the workings of the White House in times of crisis. This time I wanted to try to do the same, but about the true power of the CIA. Meeting with the higher-ups of the Agency, but also the men on the ground—those who dreamed of being new James Bonds but who were left only a dirty job for little money. These CIA agents are neither naive nor choirboys.

Yet they were willing to talk.... They talk because they have scores to settle—with their predecessors, with their successors. [my translation]

And Karel describes his approach as—

Knitting together a story with several voices. Leaving the words of the witnesses to make the point. Almost no commentary, a few facts required to understand the subject.

“CIA: Secret Wars” was shown on French television, the Arte channel, in 2003. De defensa, a French journal of political analysis, considers the film to be so outstanding that it has published a transcript of Part III of the film, of which it says,

This documentary is remarkable for its rhythm, its profusion of circumstances, of connections, of established facts that paint a picture that captures the state of power in the USA, of its vertiginous decadence, of its corruption that is as much psychological as venal. We think the transcript brings its effect back to life.

Another aspect that stands out in the document is the feeling of the extraordinary depth of the crisis in the US intelligence services, primarily the CIA, essentially because of the treatment to which they have been made to submit and to which they are being made to submit by Presidents Clinton and GW Bush. This is an unprecedented factor: everybody knows that the CIA is in crisis, but what is brought out here is that it may be a matter of a mortal crisis, notably stemming from a complete rupture—at the level of activities and of confidence—between the CIA and the political authorities. [my translation]

I chose to divide the transcript into three parts, and I've translated and presented the last of the parts first. This section deals with the period from George Jr.'s ascension to the Presidency. There is material in the other sections that is, if anything, even more gripping. And I will try to get them posted in the next few days.

In the meanwhile, this post remains, so far as I know, the only English version available of this document. Enjoy.
 

Warning: I am not a French-to-English translator by trade. In addition, I have the odd task of translating language that was originally uttered in English, then rendered into French, back into English. It’s a little like the children’s game of Gossip in which a child passes a "secret" to another child, who passes it to still another, until the “secret” returns to the first child. There is inevitably some distortion.

To anyone more versed in French than I: You are welcome to comment or to write me with suggestions for corrections or other edits. They will be promptly noted in the text.

In a spine-chilling video footage, posted on a website, Murat Yuce was shown being lectured, blindfolded and shot in the head. As his body slid forward, the executioner shot him twice more in the head.

News of the execution prompted Turkish truckers to stop ferrying goods to US forces in Iraq. "In today’s conditions there is no security for drivers in Iraq. Until security can be guaranteed, we have stopped transporting goods for US forces," Cahit Soysal, head of the International Transporters’ Association (UND), said in Ankara. The group represents around 40 companies.

The AP runs a much lengthier piece, which struggles to describe everything happening in the Middle East, then says this—

Several nations — most recently the Philippines — have withdrawn troops from Iraq in the increasing militant violence, and several companies have met militant demands to spare employees. The same group that claimed to have killed the Turk said Monday it would free a Somali captive because his Kuwaiti employer agreed to cease business in Iraq.

In the videotape, posted on an Islamic Web site used by militant groups, a man kneels in front of three armed men and reads a statement in Turkish. He identifies himself as Murat Yuce from the Turkish capital, Ankara, an employee of a Turkish company that subcontracted for a Jordanian firm.

"I have a word of advice for any Turk who wants to come to Iraq to work: 'You don't have to be holding a gun to be aiding the occupationist United States. ... Turkish companies should withdraw from Iraq," he says.

At the end of the statement, one of the masked men takes out a pistol and shoots the Turk in the side of the head. He slumps to the ground, and the kidnapper shoots him in the head twice more. Blood is seen on the ground next to his head.

A black banner on the wall identifies the group as Tawhid and Jihad. The group — led by the Jordanian militant linked to al-Qaida, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — kidnapped two other Turks last week, both truck drivers.

In Ankara, Yuce's employer, Bilintur, issued a statement saying it had heard of his killing. It said he was one of two employees missing in Iraq for three or four days. "Our grief is huge," it said. It said Bilintur was providing a laundry service for a Jordanian company in Iraq. It did not identify the other missing employee. [emphasis mine]

Pretty awful stuff.

The head of Turkey's International Transportation Association, Cahit Soysal, said Monday that by agreeing to stop working with U.S. forces in Iraq, Turkish truckers hope the kidnappers will release the two drivers.

Soysal said the stoppage would affect only the 200-300 trucks owned by more than a dozen Turkish companies that had brought supplies — mostly fuel — to U.S. forces every day. Another 1,700-1,800 trucks with supplies for other purposes would continue to cross the border into Iraq, he said.

If his numbers are correct, that is between 11% and 18% of the truckers no matter how you spin it. And by the way, who's going to replace them? Are the U.S. forces just going to do without the fuel?

Related post: Will kidnappings alter the Iraqi employment situation? (updated)

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KIDSPY: Spy for a Day

Thursday 26 August 2004; 9 am to 3 pm Sold Out!

A fun day of secrets, surprises, and adventure awaits!

As a Spy Recruit, you will don a disguise, take on an alias, perfect a cover story, and venture forth on missions we can't reveal to the adults who may be reading this description! Operation Beat the Heat will put your spy-skills and street-smarts to the test. Code making and breaking, surveillance and counter surveillance, and even concealment device-making are just some of the challenges that await.

Ages: 9-13 No Grown-ups Allowed!

Tickets: $85 per participant*

Members of the Spy Ring --Become a Spy Family Today: $75

Space is limited – advance registration required!

*Includes activities,1 lunch, and take-home spy tools

Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.

What community leaders are saying—

Paul L. Vance, Superintendent of the District of Columbia Public Schools

We believe that the proposed programs for school groups will provide a unique opportunity to add an intriguing dimension to the study of history, world geography, foreign languages, special effects, computer technology and intelligence operations as possible career options...

Maudine R. Cooper, President and CEO of the Greater Washington Urban League, Inc.

.... We believe that the International Spy Museum and Malrite’s interest in working with the Urban League’s various youth and training programs will help further our ongoing objectives.

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Two studies in psychology may shed some light on an enigma: Given the Bush administration’s incompetence in affairs both foreign and domestic, its destruction of American civil rights, its failure to benefit anyone but the elite, and its unparalleled mendacity, how is it that almost 50% of the voting population still intends to vote for Bush?

Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon have been working on the problem.

In their first study, university student volunteers were divided into two groups. One group was asked to think about their own death; the other group was given a neutral topic. They were then read campaign statements representing three leadership styles:

• charismatic

declaring the country to be great and the people in it to be special

• task-oriented

"let’s get the job done"

• relationship-oriented

"let’s get the job done together"

Of those who thought about exams,1 only 4% chose the charismatic leader; but of those who thought about death, 30% went for charisma.

Additional studies were then conducted that related the findings specifically to the coming election. In one study, half of the subjects were asked to think about television, and the other half about 9/11.

When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.

"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said.

Solomon, a social psychologist who specializes in terrorism, said it was very rare for a person's opinions to differ so strongly depending on the situation.

In another study, volunteers from 18 into their 50s of all political persuasions, “tend to favor Bush” over Kerry after thinking about death. “Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.”

"I think this should concern anybody," Solomon said. "If I was speaking lightly, I would say that people in their, quote, right minds, unquote, don't care much for President Bush and his policies in Iraq."
....
"If people are aware that thinking about death makes them act differently, then they don't act differently," Solomon said.

What Solomon is referring to may be thought of as “psychological innoculation.” By becoming aware of techniques of social control, we are better able to resist them. The military uses this type of training to help soldiers who may be captured.

Since to some extent we are all now a captive population, the better we understand the methods of our captors, the better we will be able to resist.

Try to innoculate as many people as you can.