by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga
First Chapter
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Bush Makes Iraq the Vital Reason for his Impeachment and Removal
Published on Sunday, March 26, 2006 by the Free Press
by Harvey Wasserman
George W. Bush has clarified the most vital reason why he must be impeached and removed from office as soon as possible: the slaughter in Iraq, and his clear statement that it will not end while he is in the White House.
Bush has made his departure the light at the end of the tunnel. If he stays, more killing is inevitable. If he goes, a quicker end to the war is not certain, but it is more likely. Nobody expects Dick Cheney to pull out of Iraq if he succeeds Bush.
But a successful impeachment and removal will reshape all American politics, and open up the possibilities. Bush's escalating unpopularity has moved impeachment talk out of the margins, toward the mainstream. Increasingly worried GOP hacks portray it as an attack on Bush's ability to protect the country, and on our soldiers.
But polls now show a majority of US troops in Iraq say the war should end in 2006, not 2009. More than 80% of the Iraqi people want the US out now. By pledging to prolong the slaughter, Bush endangers both our troops and our national security. The war is destroying the American army. It recruits and trains hordes of anti-American terrorists. It is dividing and bankrupting our nation.
Impeachment and removal have become vitally necessary to preserve whatever defenses the US has left against international terrorism. Bush supporters also say that ending the war is a policy decision, and not a legal issue. But lying to Congress and the public to bring the nation into a war is a clear violation of the president's Constitutional oath. Bush's abuse of the Fourth Amendment and other laws in his wiretapping campaign is also an impeachable offense.
The impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which was really about his policy toward the south after the Civil War, was on trumped-on charges. He was not removed. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, which was really about his being Bill Clinton, was also on trumped-up charges. He was not removed.
But the threat of impeachment against Richard Nixon was based on the very real illegalities of lying and covering up a series of Watergate-related acts. He also could---should---have been removed for the illegal bombing of Cambodia, and other crimes stemming from the Vietnam war.
Nixon resigned at the brink of being removed. The impeachment campaign did have an important impact on curtailing his intent to prolong the slaughter in Vietnam, which finally did end with Nixon out of the White House.
George W. Bush now says he won't end his Iraq attack without being removed from office. Unlike the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, there is more than ample legal ground for doing just that. And the support is escalating.
It has become a matter of life and death. Let's roll.
by Harvey Wasserman
George W. Bush has clarified the most vital reason why he must be impeached and removed from office as soon as possible: the slaughter in Iraq, and his clear statement that it will not end while he is in the White House.
Bush has made his departure the light at the end of the tunnel. If he stays, more killing is inevitable. If he goes, a quicker end to the war is not certain, but it is more likely. Nobody expects Dick Cheney to pull out of Iraq if he succeeds Bush.
But a successful impeachment and removal will reshape all American politics, and open up the possibilities. Bush's escalating unpopularity has moved impeachment talk out of the margins, toward the mainstream. Increasingly worried GOP hacks portray it as an attack on Bush's ability to protect the country, and on our soldiers.
But polls now show a majority of US troops in Iraq say the war should end in 2006, not 2009. More than 80% of the Iraqi people want the US out now. By pledging to prolong the slaughter, Bush endangers both our troops and our national security. The war is destroying the American army. It recruits and trains hordes of anti-American terrorists. It is dividing and bankrupting our nation.
Impeachment and removal have become vitally necessary to preserve whatever defenses the US has left against international terrorism. Bush supporters also say that ending the war is a policy decision, and not a legal issue. But lying to Congress and the public to bring the nation into a war is a clear violation of the president's Constitutional oath. Bush's abuse of the Fourth Amendment and other laws in his wiretapping campaign is also an impeachable offense.
The impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which was really about his policy toward the south after the Civil War, was on trumped-on charges. He was not removed. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, which was really about his being Bill Clinton, was also on trumped-up charges. He was not removed.
But the threat of impeachment against Richard Nixon was based on the very real illegalities of lying and covering up a series of Watergate-related acts. He also could---should---have been removed for the illegal bombing of Cambodia, and other crimes stemming from the Vietnam war.
Nixon resigned at the brink of being removed. The impeachment campaign did have an important impact on curtailing his intent to prolong the slaughter in Vietnam, which finally did end with Nixon out of the White House.
George W. Bush now says he won't end his Iraq attack without being removed from office. Unlike the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, there is more than ample legal ground for doing just that. And the support is escalating.
It has become a matter of life and death. Let's roll.
Bush backlash
Republicans on the Run
If the midterm elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives.
New Poll: The Democrats by 9 Points
If the midterm elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives.
New Poll: The Democrats by 9 Points
Solving Cuba's Katrina Donation Problem
by SusanG
Sat Mar 25, 2006 at 01:56:42 PM PDT
From Reuters yesterday:
Cuba finished second in the 16-nation [World Baseball Classic] competition and the runner-up was entitled to 7 percent of the tournament's profits. But under the 1962 U.S. trade embargo, Havana had to forfeit its cut to get U.S. approval to play.
Castro, welcoming Cuba's players home as champions despite their 10-6 loss to Japan in Monday's final in San Diego, said on Tuesday the Cuban prize money would be donated to victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The Bush administration, however, is not prepared to allow such altruism by the Cuban leader.
Psssst ... Mr. Castro. Earmark the contribution for Neil Bush's educational software company and see what happens.
It's what the compassionate people with beautiful minds are doing:
HOUSTON -- Former first lady Barbara Bush contributed money to a hurricane-relief fund on the condition that it be spent to buy educational software from her son Neil's company.
Even better, make sure you invest in the company first so you not only benefit the Bush family, but you get it on the profits as well! According to Talking Points Memo, that's exactly what the former first lady's doing.
Sat Mar 25, 2006 at 01:56:42 PM PDT
From Reuters yesterday:
Cuba finished second in the 16-nation [World Baseball Classic] competition and the runner-up was entitled to 7 percent of the tournament's profits. But under the 1962 U.S. trade embargo, Havana had to forfeit its cut to get U.S. approval to play.
Castro, welcoming Cuba's players home as champions despite their 10-6 loss to Japan in Monday's final in San Diego, said on Tuesday the Cuban prize money would be donated to victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The Bush administration, however, is not prepared to allow such altruism by the Cuban leader.
Psssst ... Mr. Castro. Earmark the contribution for Neil Bush's educational software company and see what happens.
It's what the compassionate people with beautiful minds are doing:
HOUSTON -- Former first lady Barbara Bush contributed money to a hurricane-relief fund on the condition that it be spent to buy educational software from her son Neil's company.
Even better, make sure you invest in the company first so you not only benefit the Bush family, but you get it on the profits as well! According to Talking Points Memo, that's exactly what the former first lady's doing.
Bush Wants to Make IMF and World Bank Even Worse
By Matthew Rothschild
Tucked away deep in the new “National Security Strategy” that Bush released on March 16 was some bad news for Third World countries: Bush wants the IMF and World Bank to shove the free market even further down their throats.
read more
Tucked away deep in the new “National Security Strategy” that Bush released on March 16 was some bad news for Third World countries: Bush wants the IMF and World Bank to shove the free market even further down their throats.
read more
The Procrastinator-in-Chief
Today’s messes are being left for future presidents to clean up.
By Terence Samuel
There were a couple of head-shaking moments this week that forced me to acknowledge the obvious: As bad as things are, they can, and likely will, get worse. The only real connection between these two media events was how much we already knew about what was supposed to be "the news," and the completely unappetizing sheen they draped on the future.
First, the president admitted that he got us into a war which he was not going to get us out of. He acknowledged that when he is back in Crawford enjoying his retirement, clearing brush and shooting quail, American troops will still be in Iraq, fighting and dying for reasons that the majority of Americans have yet to understand, though the president keeps explaining and re-explaining them.
Asked if he foresaw a day when there would be no U.S. troops in Iraq, the president grew visionary, anticipating a time after he has left the White House. "That, of course, is an objective," he said in response to a reporter's question, "and that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
After that burst of candor, Bush was pressed on whether such an objective was possible during what was left of his administration. He retreated to platitudes. Since everyone knows exactly how much time he has left in office, he reasoned, to envision a complete withdrawal during that period would be setting a timetable, and, as we know, this president does not negotiate with timetables.
“A complete withdrawal?” he asked. “That's a timetable. I can only tell you that I will make decisions on force levels based upon what the commanders on the ground say.”
This should not have been surprising. It has been clear for a long time that Iraq was going to be a long war, but having grown used to the rosy, fact-free storytelling that comes out of the White House, we just don’t expect the truth when the news is bad. Frankly, there was something about Bush's admission that made the long-term reality of the war very concrete. To me, the suggestion that the debacle of Iraq was something to be passed on from administration to administration, without resolution, was more than a little maddening.
There was also something in the president's acknowledgement that made me think that the bad news may be worse than it seems right now. I realize that I have just described the inner life of a cynic, but that flows naturally from the other startling news of the week.
According to Tuesday's edition of The New York Times, all the horrible things you know already about under-educated, unemployed, inner-city black men, is nothing compared to the latest truth. We've known that things were bad for them, their children, and the mothers of those children, but in fact it's actually worse. One jaw-dropping statistic cited in the piece claims that, on some days, there are more young black men in jail than at work.
Again, I guess I should not have been surprised. “Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever, and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.” Whose consituency is this? We are talking about a pool of about 5 million men, most of whom did not graduate from high school, have no prospects for employments, and then father children and head to off to prison. Freedom, to say the least, is not on the march in places like inner-city Cleveland, or North St. Louis, or Chester, Pa. To hear the president tell it, to see the march of freedom you have to go to Baghdad and Basra.
The studies, and there are several of them, say that by the time they are in their mid-30s, 60 percent of black men who dropped out of high school have spent time in prison. That’s a lot of free food and lodging, but it's not exactly nation-building.
The studies are breathless in their urgency, but you have to wonder who is going to carry this banner into battle this election year. Republicans can easily take the president's position on Iraq troop withdrawal as their own on the black men issue: “It'll be up to someone else clean up that mess.”
Democrats on the other hand, confront hypocrisy and cowardice on the matter. Low graduation rates and high incarceration rates among black men are not issues that will move swing voters. It cannot easily be cast as a middle-class pocketbook issue, or as a national-security concern. When the mid-term campaigns heat up in earnest, expect instead a lot a talk about the future of Iraq, and the risk we run as a nation if we don't make the right choices and the right investments to extricate ourselves from that mess.
The extraordinarily sticky issue of fashioning a future for inner-city black men and their children will be lucky to get a mention at all.
It 'll be up to future presidents to ignore them. Again.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
By Terence Samuel
There were a couple of head-shaking moments this week that forced me to acknowledge the obvious: As bad as things are, they can, and likely will, get worse. The only real connection between these two media events was how much we already knew about what was supposed to be "the news," and the completely unappetizing sheen they draped on the future.
First, the president admitted that he got us into a war which he was not going to get us out of. He acknowledged that when he is back in Crawford enjoying his retirement, clearing brush and shooting quail, American troops will still be in Iraq, fighting and dying for reasons that the majority of Americans have yet to understand, though the president keeps explaining and re-explaining them.
Asked if he foresaw a day when there would be no U.S. troops in Iraq, the president grew visionary, anticipating a time after he has left the White House. "That, of course, is an objective," he said in response to a reporter's question, "and that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
After that burst of candor, Bush was pressed on whether such an objective was possible during what was left of his administration. He retreated to platitudes. Since everyone knows exactly how much time he has left in office, he reasoned, to envision a complete withdrawal during that period would be setting a timetable, and, as we know, this president does not negotiate with timetables.
“A complete withdrawal?” he asked. “That's a timetable. I can only tell you that I will make decisions on force levels based upon what the commanders on the ground say.”
This should not have been surprising. It has been clear for a long time that Iraq was going to be a long war, but having grown used to the rosy, fact-free storytelling that comes out of the White House, we just don’t expect the truth when the news is bad. Frankly, there was something about Bush's admission that made the long-term reality of the war very concrete. To me, the suggestion that the debacle of Iraq was something to be passed on from administration to administration, without resolution, was more than a little maddening.
There was also something in the president's acknowledgement that made me think that the bad news may be worse than it seems right now. I realize that I have just described the inner life of a cynic, but that flows naturally from the other startling news of the week.
According to Tuesday's edition of The New York Times, all the horrible things you know already about under-educated, unemployed, inner-city black men, is nothing compared to the latest truth. We've known that things were bad for them, their children, and the mothers of those children, but in fact it's actually worse. One jaw-dropping statistic cited in the piece claims that, on some days, there are more young black men in jail than at work.
Again, I guess I should not have been surprised. “Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever, and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.” Whose consituency is this? We are talking about a pool of about 5 million men, most of whom did not graduate from high school, have no prospects for employments, and then father children and head to off to prison. Freedom, to say the least, is not on the march in places like inner-city Cleveland, or North St. Louis, or Chester, Pa. To hear the president tell it, to see the march of freedom you have to go to Baghdad and Basra.
The studies, and there are several of them, say that by the time they are in their mid-30s, 60 percent of black men who dropped out of high school have spent time in prison. That’s a lot of free food and lodging, but it's not exactly nation-building.
The studies are breathless in their urgency, but you have to wonder who is going to carry this banner into battle this election year. Republicans can easily take the president's position on Iraq troop withdrawal as their own on the black men issue: “It'll be up to someone else clean up that mess.”
Democrats on the other hand, confront hypocrisy and cowardice on the matter. Low graduation rates and high incarceration rates among black men are not issues that will move swing voters. It cannot easily be cast as a middle-class pocketbook issue, or as a national-security concern. When the mid-term campaigns heat up in earnest, expect instead a lot a talk about the future of Iraq, and the risk we run as a nation if we don't make the right choices and the right investments to extricate ourselves from that mess.
The extraordinarily sticky issue of fashioning a future for inner-city black men and their children will be lucky to get a mention at all.
It 'll be up to future presidents to ignore them. Again.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
Feingold Stands Alone Again When Standing on Principle
Published on Saturday, March 25, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
by Joel McNally
By now it's no surprise when Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold steps out ahead of his colleagues in Washington on the most important political issues of the day.
In the U.S. Senate, most politicians prefer to hide under their desks during any controversy until a clear majority is formed on one side. Then they crawl through the ankles of the crowd, stand upright and pose for smiling pictures at the front of the pack.
Feingold is that rare politician who actually feels comfortable taking a principled stand even if it means standing alone.
It's a leadership style that requires, well, leading. But it's definitely not for the timid. There are no potted plants to hide behind.
The only satisfaction comes from being right from the start. Right about the war in Iraq, right about the attack on American freedoms launched under the cover of fighting terrorism and right about whether the president of the United States should be required to obey the laws we pass.
Of course, if there's anything politicians are terrified to oppose it is war. What sort of politician wants to be known as someone who is opposed to blowing up innocent civilians and turning healthy young Americans into cannon fodder?
That's why Feingold was one of the few Democrats who had the courage to vote against launching a pre-emptive war in Iraq, a country that was absolutely no threat to us since its weapons of mass destruction existed only in the fevered imaginations of the Bush administration.
There were plenty of other Democrats (and maybe even a few intelligent Republicans) who knew that going to war with Iraq was a total waste of U.S. resources and a ridiculous distraction from our real priority of pursuing Osama bin Laden and the terrorist organization that had attacked America.
The trouble was the Democrats who knew better were afraid they would never be able to run for president unless they acted really tough by voting to pour American lives down a rat hole in Iraq.
Ironically, by the time Senators John Kerry and John Edwards ran against George W. Bush, the most difficult question they failed to answer was how they could have been so dumb as to vote for Bush's unnecessary war.
It's true Iraq was run by a brutal dictator. No one misses Saddam Hussein except cartoonists.
But three years ago if we had lined up 2,400 American soldiers and asked the American people if they would be willing to sacrifice the lives of those fellow citizens so Iraqis could vote for a brand-new despot of their own choosing to run their death squads, how many Americans would have accepted the deal?
Politicians are easily spooked even when they don't have to confront issues of life and death. Sometimes all it takes to terrify them is putting a really scary name on a bill.
That is why the entire U.S. Senate, except for Russ Feingold, was absolutely petrified to vote against a bill called the USA Patriot Act. They were horrified by the vision of Republican attack ads accusing them of voting against a bill with such a glorious name.
Never mind that the bill was as dishonestly named as all of those Bush administration proposals to pollute the environment and murder wildlife that carry names such as the Sunny Skies and Happy Bunny Rabbits Act.
The USA Patriot Act should have been more appropriately titled the Totalitarian Takeover of America to Suspend Our Laws and Promote Torture Act.
Which brings us to Russ Feingold's latest and most controversial solitary stand to do what's right.
President Bush now claims he didn't even need to pass that dreadful Patriot Act. Bush's attorney general, who previously wrote an opinion giving the president the right to violate international laws on torture, has drafted another opinion stating the president doesn't need to obey any laws passed by Congress either.
Recent presidents who have acted as if they were above the law have faced impeachment. That was true of Richard Nixon, who truly committed high crimes by covering up black bag burglaries run out of the White House. And it was true of Bill Clinton, who committed the lowly misdemeanor of lying about his private sex life.
Feingold has terrified his fellow politicians without even taking the totally justified step of calling for Bush's impeachment for violating the law and lying to the American people about it.
Feingold simply suggested the Senate "censure," in effect say "tut, tut," to President Bush for violating an explicit law passed by Congress requiring the government to get a warrant before wiretapping American citizens.
Democrat and Republican politicians alike have been fleeing Feingold's resolution like cockroaches suddenly caught in the bathroom light.
It doesn't take very much to stand out amid a swarm of politicians who are terrified to even stand up.
by Joel McNally
By now it's no surprise when Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold steps out ahead of his colleagues in Washington on the most important political issues of the day.
In the U.S. Senate, most politicians prefer to hide under their desks during any controversy until a clear majority is formed on one side. Then they crawl through the ankles of the crowd, stand upright and pose for smiling pictures at the front of the pack.
Feingold is that rare politician who actually feels comfortable taking a principled stand even if it means standing alone.
It's a leadership style that requires, well, leading. But it's definitely not for the timid. There are no potted plants to hide behind.
The only satisfaction comes from being right from the start. Right about the war in Iraq, right about the attack on American freedoms launched under the cover of fighting terrorism and right about whether the president of the United States should be required to obey the laws we pass.
Of course, if there's anything politicians are terrified to oppose it is war. What sort of politician wants to be known as someone who is opposed to blowing up innocent civilians and turning healthy young Americans into cannon fodder?
That's why Feingold was one of the few Democrats who had the courage to vote against launching a pre-emptive war in Iraq, a country that was absolutely no threat to us since its weapons of mass destruction existed only in the fevered imaginations of the Bush administration.
There were plenty of other Democrats (and maybe even a few intelligent Republicans) who knew that going to war with Iraq was a total waste of U.S. resources and a ridiculous distraction from our real priority of pursuing Osama bin Laden and the terrorist organization that had attacked America.
The trouble was the Democrats who knew better were afraid they would never be able to run for president unless they acted really tough by voting to pour American lives down a rat hole in Iraq.
Ironically, by the time Senators John Kerry and John Edwards ran against George W. Bush, the most difficult question they failed to answer was how they could have been so dumb as to vote for Bush's unnecessary war.
It's true Iraq was run by a brutal dictator. No one misses Saddam Hussein except cartoonists.
But three years ago if we had lined up 2,400 American soldiers and asked the American people if they would be willing to sacrifice the lives of those fellow citizens so Iraqis could vote for a brand-new despot of their own choosing to run their death squads, how many Americans would have accepted the deal?
Politicians are easily spooked even when they don't have to confront issues of life and death. Sometimes all it takes to terrify them is putting a really scary name on a bill.
That is why the entire U.S. Senate, except for Russ Feingold, was absolutely petrified to vote against a bill called the USA Patriot Act. They were horrified by the vision of Republican attack ads accusing them of voting against a bill with such a glorious name.
Never mind that the bill was as dishonestly named as all of those Bush administration proposals to pollute the environment and murder wildlife that carry names such as the Sunny Skies and Happy Bunny Rabbits Act.
The USA Patriot Act should have been more appropriately titled the Totalitarian Takeover of America to Suspend Our Laws and Promote Torture Act.
Which brings us to Russ Feingold's latest and most controversial solitary stand to do what's right.
President Bush now claims he didn't even need to pass that dreadful Patriot Act. Bush's attorney general, who previously wrote an opinion giving the president the right to violate international laws on torture, has drafted another opinion stating the president doesn't need to obey any laws passed by Congress either.
Recent presidents who have acted as if they were above the law have faced impeachment. That was true of Richard Nixon, who truly committed high crimes by covering up black bag burglaries run out of the White House. And it was true of Bill Clinton, who committed the lowly misdemeanor of lying about his private sex life.
Feingold has terrified his fellow politicians without even taking the totally justified step of calling for Bush's impeachment for violating the law and lying to the American people about it.
Feingold simply suggested the Senate "censure," in effect say "tut, tut," to President Bush for violating an explicit law passed by Congress requiring the government to get a warrant before wiretapping American citizens.
Democrat and Republican politicians alike have been fleeing Feingold's resolution like cockroaches suddenly caught in the bathroom light.
It doesn't take very much to stand out amid a swarm of politicians who are terrified to even stand up.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What?
The New York Times
March 26, 2006
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Layoffs have disrupted the lives of millions of Americans over the last 25 years. The cure that these displaced workers are offered — retraining and more education — is heralded as a sure path to new and better-paying careers. But often that policy prescription does not work, as this book excerpt explains. It is adapted from "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences" by Louis Uchitelle, an economics writer for The New York Times. Knopf will publish the book on Tuesday.
JO GOODRUM, a thin, energetic woman older than her audience of aircraft mechanics — old enough, perhaps, to be their mother — got their attention with a single, unexpected sentence, which she inserted early in her presentation. Her husband, she said, had been laid off six times since the late 1980's. And yet here she was, standing before them, in one piece, cheerful, apparently O.K., giving survival instructions to the mechanics, who would be laid off themselves in 10 days.
They were, in nearly every case, family men in their 30's and 40's who had worked for United Airlines since the mid-1990's. Summoned by their union, they had gathered in the carpeted conference room at the Days Inn next to Indianapolis International Airport, not far from United's giant maintenance center, a building so big that 12 airliners could be overhauled in it simultaneously. That no longer happened. Most of the repair bays were empty. The airline was cutting back operations, and the 60 mechanics at the meeting were in the fourth group to be let go.
Confrontation had brought on the layoffs. Influenced by militants in their union local, Hoosier Air Transport Lodge 2294 of the International Association of Machinists, the 2,000 mechanics at the center had engaged in a work slowdown for many months, and then a refusal to work overtime. But rather than give ground, United responded by outsourcing, sending planes to nonunion contractors elsewhere in the country.
That scared the mechanics. They quieted down and, in effect, authorized the leaders of Lodge 2294 to make peace. Their hope was that if they cooperated, United would ease up on the layoffs and revive operations at, arguably, one of the most efficient, high-tech maintenance centers in the world. In this state of mind, the union was helping to usher the 60 laid-off mechanics quietly away. It had rented the conference room on this cold January evening in 2003 to introduce the men to what amounted to a boot camp for recycling laid-off workers back into new, usually lower-paying lines of work.
SIMILAR federally subsidized boot camps, organized by state and local governments, often in league with unions, have proliferated in the United States since the 1980's, and now many cities have them. Unable to stop layoffs, government has taken on the task of refitting discarded workers for "alternate careers." In deciding as a nation to try to rejuvenate them as workers, we put in place a system, however unrealistic, that implicitly acknowledged layoffs as a legitimate practice.
The presumption — promoted by economists, educators, business executives and nearly all of the nation's political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike — holds that in America's vibrant and flexible economy there is work, at good pay, for the educated and skilled. The unemployed need only to get themselves educated and skilled and the work will materialize. Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking. Or, put another way, an appropriate job at decent pay materializes for every trained or educated worker.
If the workers were already trained, as the mechanics certainly were, then what they needed was additional training and counseling as a transition into well-paying, unfilled jobs in other industries. If the transition failed to function as advertised, well, the accepted wisdom suggested that it was the fault of the workers themselves. Their failure to land good jobs was due to personality defects or a resistance to acquiring new skills or a reluctance to move where the good jobs were.
That was the myth. It evaporated in practice for the aircraft mechanics, whose hourly pay ranged up to $31. Not enough job openings exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs don't just materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb all the qualified people who want them.
You cannot be an engineer or an accountant without a degree; in that sense, education and training certainly do count. Furthermore, in the competition for the jobs that exist, the educated and trained have an edge. That advantage shows up regularly in wage comparisons. But you cannot earn an engineer's or an accountant's typical pay if companies are not hiring engineers and accountants, or are hiring relatively few and can control the wage, chipping away at it.
For the mechanics at the Days Inn, the retraining process would begin in a few days with workshops in résumé writing and interviewing skills, personality evaluations and job counseling — and, for a lucky few, tuition grants to go back to school. The mechanics were being "counseled out" of their well-paying trade, as some of them wryly put it, and Mrs. Goodrum was the lead-off speaker in this endeavor.
She presented herself as one of them. Her husband's wage slid from $25 an hour in his heyday as a factory worker in the 1980's to $10 an hour in his latest job in a watch store. To supplement that falling income, she had taken part-time work as an "education presenter" for the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Indiana.
In this capacity, it was her task to explain how easy it would be for the departing mechanics — separated from salaries of $55,000 a year and up — to sink deeply into debt. The glimpse that she offered of her husband's downfall suggested that she had learned these lessons herself.
Distinguish, she said, between needs and wants. Rent, food, insurance premiums — those are needs. Cable television is a want; cancel it. Day care can be a want or a need. It's a need for parents with jobs, but a want for the soon-to-be-laid-off mechanics who would now have more time to watch their children themselves.
In the blue-collar world, aircraft mechanics are at the top, and these were painful economies for them. They are the highly skilled people who repair and overhaul the nation's airliners. Each mechanic in the room had completed two years of collegelike schooling to qualify for the exacting task of dismantling and rebuilding airliners every five years, the work carried out at the maintenance center. Several compared their role proudly to that of a pilot, claiming as much credit as the pilots for the safety of air travel.
Now they were falling out of this high-level world, in most cases for good. They were unlikely to match or come close in their next jobs to the level of pay that would soon cease. They would be newcomers again in the work force. They must learn how to get a foot in the door, the speakers that evening unceremoniously told them. Their careers were gone, and the grief at this loss must be absorbed in order to move on.
Recognizing their vulnerability, Mrs. Goodrum spoke to the mechanics in the simplified, encouraging language that a skilled teacher uses to instruct children who are just learning to read, or that a speech therapist adopts to guide stroke victims struggling to speak again. Did the mechanics realize, she said, that credit card companies and mortgage lenders give special consideration to laid-off workers? She held up a "sample letter to a creditor" in which the writer announces his layoff, says he expects to be working again in three months and proposes to reduce his payments in the meantime. "It is very important that you negotiate now," she said, "and not when you are 60 days behind on a debt."
When Mrs. Goodrum had finished outlining in step-by-step detail the various survival strategies, Ben Nunnally, then 44 and the president of Lodge 2294, rose and without moving from behind the head table inserted into the proceedings some impromptu advice of his own, exercising his authority one last time as their union leader. While he had the mechanics in one room, Mr. Nunnally said, he wanted to caution them about the unemployment checks they would soon be getting. If they did not file promptly on Jan. 25, their last day, they could waste two weeks in collecting the first check.
Even if the unemployment pay arrived on time, it would be little enough: $336 a week for 26 weeks, way below the nearly $1,100 a week or so that the mechanics had been earning at United. Mr. Nunnally, however, made no mention of either amount. "We have no choice but to offer as little conflict as possible with United and hope that will avoid more layoffs," he said afterward.
It was a wasted hope. Three months later, in April 2003, United abruptly laid off the 1,100 remaining mechanics, including Mr. Nunnally. On May 4, it said it would abandon the maintenance center completely. Outsourcing had won, hands down, and although Mr. Nunnally stayed on as the president of the much-diminished union local, he, too, applied for unemployment pay.
Mr. Nunnally had experienced the center's glory days. He joined United in 1989 as a 30-year-old mechanic in San Francisco and transferred to Indianapolis in 1994, drawn by the lower cost of living and the recently opened center. The mechanics in Indiana worked mostly on Boeing 737's, but as United expanded the operation — opening more repair bays, hiring more mechanics and extending the legs of the L-shaped building until each was nearly a half-mile long — they also overhauled other so-called narrow-body aircraft, including Airbus 319's and 320's and the larger Boeing 757's.
With morale high in the 1990's and the mechanics willing to work hard, they put airliners through their periodic overhauls in record time. The stem-to-stern refurbishing of a 737 normally required 22 days at other maintenance centers. The mechanics at Indianapolis cut that to 11 days for a 737 going through its first heavy maintenance and to less than 20 days for older planes. "We had overhaul bays that kind of competed in a friendly way to see who could do the best," said Frederick L. Mohr, general manager of the Indianapolis center from 1997 until 2002.
The rapid turnaround meant an infusion of passenger revenue from the additional days that the plane was in service, helping to justify the mechanics' pay of $26 an hour in the late 1990's.
Capitalizing on the growing productivity, United itself got into outsourcing as a means of keeping the giant center busy during slack periods in its own operations. America West was sending 737's and 757's to Indianapolis for heavy maintenance, and by the spring of 1999 the work force had grown to 2,400 mechanics from fewer than 250 when Mr. Nunnally arrived in 1994. The fast turnarounds and reliable work justified the relatively high fees that United charged, and America West shifted maintenance to Indianapolis from a private, less expensive contractor in Portland, Ore., whose mechanics earned less.
It was outsourcing in reverse, an American victory in the global competition. "We had people visiting us from Europe to see what we were doing," Mr. Mohr said.
What these visitors saw as they approached the maintenance center was a strikingly futuristic light gray structure, trimmed jauntily in blue, that had risen in the rolling, grassy fields on the far side of the runways, opposite the terminal. The soaring entrance hall, designed to suggest a giant airliner cabin without seats, reflected the efficiencies that were built into nearly every aspect of the building. The mechanics came and went through this hall, where before or after a shift or during a meal break, they took care of nonproductive chores: banking at a credit union, visiting a personnel office, shopping at a small store.
On the eve of the closing, only Hangar 1A was active. A 737 was parked there, its interior gutted. It was the last airliner United would recondition in Indianapolis, and David Doucey, the maintenance center's operations manager, said matter-of-factly that although the mechanics had already received their layoff notices, they would finish the job seven or eight days faster than any other center could.
Parts from the dismantled interior were spread out on an unpainted wooden floor, a mezzanine that fit snugly around the plane just below the wings and stretched out 200 feet on either side. The servicing of many components removed from the cabin and cockpit took place there, eliminating the time required to send them to workshops elsewhere — the practice at other centers.
The time-saving features were numerous, and Mr. Doucey pointed them out. Hydraulic devices erect scaffolding around the plane in an hour, rather than the four hours required elsewhere. Parts are ordered by computer and delivered on an automated miniature railroad, rather than by hand or on bicycles as in other shops. A controlled climate permits mechanics to use fiberglass or graphite composites to patch a plane's outer skin without having to send the sections to special shops.
What drove away America West was the labor trouble that erupted over the Fourth of July weekend in 1999 and then mushroomed into a prolonged slowdown. In retrospect, that weekend was the turning point, the moment when the remarkable efficiencies that had been achieved at Indianapolis began to unwind, and labor-management tensions that had been accumulating suddenly asserted themselves.
IN an earlier era, the two sides would have tried to settle their differences through negotiation and would probably have succeeded. There was really no other alternative. The outsourcing of maintenance did not exist before the 1980's; airlines did their own maintenance. But now layoffs and outsourcing had become an easy and acceptable option. Everywhere in America, the barriers to layoffs came down one after another starting in the late 1970's, and by the turn of the century there was acquiescence.
The incident that started United down the road to outsourcing and layoffs seemed so minor. During the trusting years, the foremen had relaxed the restrictions on the number of mechanics who could take vacation days at the same time. For that Independence Day weekend, more than 100 mechanics had been granted time off — 10 times the prescribed number.
Mr. Mohr, the general manager, was himself on vacation in the days leading up to the weekend, and he called the office to remind his lieutenants to be careful about allowing too many mechanics to be away. Somehow that became a wholesale, last-minute cancellation of vacation time, outraging the mechanics. "To this day, they get upset when they talk about what happened that weekend," Mr. Doucey said.
The uproar over vacations stirred up other resentments — how United had gotten tough about sick days, how it had scaled back flexible hours, how it had substituted an 8-hour shift for a 10-hour one that allowed three- and four-day weekends, which the mechanics preferred.
"Once the vacation thing happened, that ignited a lot of small fires," Mr. Nunnally said. The militants in his local fanned those fires, arguing that the mechanics, because of their unique skills, were special people, essential to airline safety, and that United should be forced to recognize their value.
Mr. Mohr resisted this logic. "Anything we had to do to respond to the business environment was seized upon by the mechanics as something negative," he said. Mr. Nunnally, who was then chairman of the lodge's grievance committee, was caught between management and his members, his leadership challenged by the militants, who numbered nearly 300 mechanics. "I said to Mohr, 'I have to have some wins, too; I can't be beaten in every grievance and do nothing,' " Mr. Nunnally said. "I practically begged him to cooperate, and he could not do that."
BY the fall of 1999, the mechanics were engaged in a slowdown. That is not difficult when airline safety is at issue. If an inspector, drawn from the ranks of the mechanics, finds fault with a newly refurbished wing flap assembly or some other repair, he writes up a ticket reporting the flaw or a potential malfunction; even if there isn't a problem, time has to be spent to investigate the issue to the satisfaction of the Federal Aviation Administration.
As the mechanics had intended, turnaround time inched up, soon reaching 15 days and eventually more than 20 days for a 737. America West stopped sending planes to Indianapolis, as the mechanics had hoped. To regain the lost business, they expected United to restore some of the lost perquisites and thus win back the mechanics' cooperation. Jobs would be preserved, and on the mechanics' terms. That did not happen, and as the slowdown dragged on, work backed up on United's own airliners. For the first time, planes were parked on the tarmac outside the center, out of service — and not generating revenue — while awaiting overhaul.
Then, in July 2000, the mechanics slowed work even more by voting to withhold overtime, to protest what the militants viewed as management's recalcitrance in negotiating a new contract to replace one that had just expired. Mr. Nunnally, as grievance chairman, had spoken against withholding overtime, and worked it himself, in defiance of his militant members, but his point of view did not prevail.
Soon after, the outsourcing began. United diverted work from Indianapolis to private contractors in Alabama and North Carolina, contractors who employed nonunion mechanics — in most cases, at lower wages and with fewer benefits. "The outsourcing was a business decision," Mr. Mohr said. "The cycle time had gotten to the point that if we did not outsource, we would have aircraft continuously parked, waiting for maintenance."
When United and the union finally signed a new contract in March 2002 — 20 months after the old one expired — and the mechanics in Lodge 2294 lifted their ban on overtime, United continued to outsource maintenance, gradually shrinking the operation in Indianapolis. Under the new agreement, the mechanics' combined wages and benefits rose to more than $60 an hour, an increase of roughly $20. While that was the first increase in five years, the new total was double the labor cost of nonunion contractors. It was too big a spread for the mechanics in Indianapolis to overcome — unless they could return to the record turnarounds achieved in the late 1990's. But the old efficiency did not reappear.
Even if it had, the outsourcing would not have stopped, and for a reason quite apart from labor costs. United would not submit again to the leverage over maintenance operations that the mechanics in Indianapolis had exercised. Outsourcing had become too easy an alternative, and the airline crisis that followed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 only encouraged the practice.
What had started as an escape from a unionized, often militant work force took on a second function. The outsourcing of heavy maintenance became a means for the airlines to cut costs, and nearly every major airline gradually moved that way. In an earlier era, before layoffs and outsourcing were acceptable options, United might have weathered the crisis by taking in work from other airlines, as it had once done with America West. But layoffs and outsourcing were now standard practice, and rather than pursue economies of scale, United sought heavy maintenance at the lowest immediate cost. As work shifted away from Indianapolis, the layoffs multiplied.
The 60 mechanics gathered at the Days Inn that January evening were in the fourth wave to lose their jobs, bringing the total to 1,200. The recycling of former mechanics into new lines of work was now in full swing, and Mr. Nunnally, when he had finished speaking about the importance of filing promptly for unemployment benefits, introduced Tori E. Bucko. She turned out to be the main speaker, the chief of the boot camp that the mechanics were being encouraged to enter.
Given her responsibilities, Ms. Bucko was surprisingly young — only 30. But as the manager of a federally subsidized program for processing laid-off airline workers in Indianapolis, she would soon play a more important role in the lives of many of the mechanics than Mr. Nunnally or the union they were leaving behind.
The program that Ms. Bucko directed was sponsored by the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, a coalition of companies, unions, government agencies and civic groups. Virtually all of the funding comes from Washington, which sends less than $7 billion a year to the states to recycle laid-off workers back into jobs. In Indiana's case, the state distributes its share of the federal money to 16 regional work-force investment boards. The Indianapolis Private Industry Council is one of these boards, and the council in turn paid a private, nonprofit company, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, to do the actual work.
Goodwill employed Ms. Bucko as the manager in charge of the recycling program for laid-off airline workers in Marion County, whose boundaries encompass the city of Indianapolis. Goodwill also recycled men and women laid off in other industries in Marion County, recruiting them as they signed up for unemployment benefits at state-run offices. But in the winter of 2003, outcast airline employees, two-thirds of them United's mechanics, were still getting special attention in what was called the AIR Project, the short name for Airline Industry Re-careerment Project, a title that suggests just how awkward and difficult recycling is.
Ms. Bucko's task, in this initial presentation at the Days Inn, was to encourage the 60 mechanics to take the next step. There would be no help for them if they failed to show up at the AIR Project's center, in an industrial park not far from the airport. There, they would be asked to fill out a detailed enrollment application and submit to a series of workshops and evaluations.
What Ms. Bucko did not mention was the pressure on her employer, Goodwill Industries, and on herself, to meet the employment goals specified in the federal grant — to get most of the mechanics re-employed at 90 percent of their previous wage. Meeting this goal was a condition for getting more federal money once the initial grant expired. In the end, Goodwill managed to put together enough money to string out the AIR Project for nearly four years. But the employment goals were not met. They could not be met; they were too optimistic, mythically optimistic.
Ms. Bucko knew that as she struggled to meet the standard. So did Carolyn Brown, vice president of the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, the agency that picked Goodwill Industries to run the project. "When large numbers of people are laid off, there just isn't any occupational cluster that is waiting out there to receive them," Ms. Brown said.
Job training, as a result, became a channeling process, channeling the unemployed into the unfilled jobs that do exist, with a veneer of training along the way. Yet job training is central to employment policy. It has been since 1982, when Congress passed the Job Training Partnership Act at the urging of President Ronald Reagan. President Bill Clinton took job training even further, making it available to higher-income workers — including the aircraft mechanics in Indianapolis.
Saying that the country should solve the skills shortage through education and training became part of nearly every politician's stump speech, an innocuous way to address the politics of unemployment without strengthening either the bargaining leverage of workers or the federal government's role in bolstering labor markets.
But training for what? The reality, as the aircraft mechanics discovered, is painfully different from the reigning wisdom. Rather than having a shortage of skills, millions of American workers have more skills than their jobs require. That is particularly true of college-educated people, who make up 30 percent of the population today, up from 10 percent in the 1960's. They often find themselves working in sales or as office administrators, or taking jobs in hotels and restaurants, or becoming carpenters, flight attendants and word processors.
The number of jobs that require a bachelor's degree has indeed been growing, but more slowly than the number of graduates, according to the Labor Department, and that trend is likely to continue through this decade. "The average college graduate is doing very well," said Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. "But on the margin, college graduates appear to be more vulnerable than in the past."
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a rough estimate of the imbalance in the demand for jobs as opposed to the supply. Each month since December 2000, it has surveyed the number of job vacancies across the country and compared it with the number of unemployed job seekers. On average, there were 2.6 job seekers for every job opening over the first 41 months of the survey. That ratio would have been even higher, according to the bureau, if the calculation had included the millions of people who stopped looking for work because they did not believe that they could get decent jobs.
So the demand for jobs is considerably greater than the supply, and the supply is not what the reigning theory says it is. Most of the unfilled jobs pay low wages and require relatively little skill, often less than the jobholder has. From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004, for example, more than 55 percent of the hiring was at wages of $13.25 an hour or less: hotel and restaurant workers, health care employees, temporary replacements and the like.
That trend is likely to continue. Seven of the 10 occupations expected to grow the fastest from 2002 through 2012, according to the Labor Department, pay less than $13.25 an hour, on average: retail salesclerks, customer service representatives, food service workers, cashiers, janitors, nurse's aides and hospital orderlies.
The $13.25 threshold is important. More than 45 percent of the nation's workers, whatever their skills, earned less than $13.25 an hour in 2004, or $27,600 a year for a full-time worker. That is roughly the income that a family of four must have in many parts of the country to maintain a standard of living minimally above the poverty level. Surely lack of skill and education does not hold down the wages of nearly half the work force.
Something quite different seems to be true: the oversupply of skilled workers is driving people into jobs beneath their skills and driving down the pay of jobs equal to their skills. Both happened to the aircraft mechanics laid off by United.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
March 26, 2006
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Layoffs have disrupted the lives of millions of Americans over the last 25 years. The cure that these displaced workers are offered — retraining and more education — is heralded as a sure path to new and better-paying careers. But often that policy prescription does not work, as this book excerpt explains. It is adapted from "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences" by Louis Uchitelle, an economics writer for The New York Times. Knopf will publish the book on Tuesday.
JO GOODRUM, a thin, energetic woman older than her audience of aircraft mechanics — old enough, perhaps, to be their mother — got their attention with a single, unexpected sentence, which she inserted early in her presentation. Her husband, she said, had been laid off six times since the late 1980's. And yet here she was, standing before them, in one piece, cheerful, apparently O.K., giving survival instructions to the mechanics, who would be laid off themselves in 10 days.
They were, in nearly every case, family men in their 30's and 40's who had worked for United Airlines since the mid-1990's. Summoned by their union, they had gathered in the carpeted conference room at the Days Inn next to Indianapolis International Airport, not far from United's giant maintenance center, a building so big that 12 airliners could be overhauled in it simultaneously. That no longer happened. Most of the repair bays were empty. The airline was cutting back operations, and the 60 mechanics at the meeting were in the fourth group to be let go.
Confrontation had brought on the layoffs. Influenced by militants in their union local, Hoosier Air Transport Lodge 2294 of the International Association of Machinists, the 2,000 mechanics at the center had engaged in a work slowdown for many months, and then a refusal to work overtime. But rather than give ground, United responded by outsourcing, sending planes to nonunion contractors elsewhere in the country.
That scared the mechanics. They quieted down and, in effect, authorized the leaders of Lodge 2294 to make peace. Their hope was that if they cooperated, United would ease up on the layoffs and revive operations at, arguably, one of the most efficient, high-tech maintenance centers in the world. In this state of mind, the union was helping to usher the 60 laid-off mechanics quietly away. It had rented the conference room on this cold January evening in 2003 to introduce the men to what amounted to a boot camp for recycling laid-off workers back into new, usually lower-paying lines of work.
SIMILAR federally subsidized boot camps, organized by state and local governments, often in league with unions, have proliferated in the United States since the 1980's, and now many cities have them. Unable to stop layoffs, government has taken on the task of refitting discarded workers for "alternate careers." In deciding as a nation to try to rejuvenate them as workers, we put in place a system, however unrealistic, that implicitly acknowledged layoffs as a legitimate practice.
The presumption — promoted by economists, educators, business executives and nearly all of the nation's political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike — holds that in America's vibrant and flexible economy there is work, at good pay, for the educated and skilled. The unemployed need only to get themselves educated and skilled and the work will materialize. Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking. Or, put another way, an appropriate job at decent pay materializes for every trained or educated worker.
If the workers were already trained, as the mechanics certainly were, then what they needed was additional training and counseling as a transition into well-paying, unfilled jobs in other industries. If the transition failed to function as advertised, well, the accepted wisdom suggested that it was the fault of the workers themselves. Their failure to land good jobs was due to personality defects or a resistance to acquiring new skills or a reluctance to move where the good jobs were.
That was the myth. It evaporated in practice for the aircraft mechanics, whose hourly pay ranged up to $31. Not enough job openings exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs don't just materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb all the qualified people who want them.
You cannot be an engineer or an accountant without a degree; in that sense, education and training certainly do count. Furthermore, in the competition for the jobs that exist, the educated and trained have an edge. That advantage shows up regularly in wage comparisons. But you cannot earn an engineer's or an accountant's typical pay if companies are not hiring engineers and accountants, or are hiring relatively few and can control the wage, chipping away at it.
For the mechanics at the Days Inn, the retraining process would begin in a few days with workshops in résumé writing and interviewing skills, personality evaluations and job counseling — and, for a lucky few, tuition grants to go back to school. The mechanics were being "counseled out" of their well-paying trade, as some of them wryly put it, and Mrs. Goodrum was the lead-off speaker in this endeavor.
She presented herself as one of them. Her husband's wage slid from $25 an hour in his heyday as a factory worker in the 1980's to $10 an hour in his latest job in a watch store. To supplement that falling income, she had taken part-time work as an "education presenter" for the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Indiana.
In this capacity, it was her task to explain how easy it would be for the departing mechanics — separated from salaries of $55,000 a year and up — to sink deeply into debt. The glimpse that she offered of her husband's downfall suggested that she had learned these lessons herself.
Distinguish, she said, between needs and wants. Rent, food, insurance premiums — those are needs. Cable television is a want; cancel it. Day care can be a want or a need. It's a need for parents with jobs, but a want for the soon-to-be-laid-off mechanics who would now have more time to watch their children themselves.
In the blue-collar world, aircraft mechanics are at the top, and these were painful economies for them. They are the highly skilled people who repair and overhaul the nation's airliners. Each mechanic in the room had completed two years of collegelike schooling to qualify for the exacting task of dismantling and rebuilding airliners every five years, the work carried out at the maintenance center. Several compared their role proudly to that of a pilot, claiming as much credit as the pilots for the safety of air travel.
Now they were falling out of this high-level world, in most cases for good. They were unlikely to match or come close in their next jobs to the level of pay that would soon cease. They would be newcomers again in the work force. They must learn how to get a foot in the door, the speakers that evening unceremoniously told them. Their careers were gone, and the grief at this loss must be absorbed in order to move on.
Recognizing their vulnerability, Mrs. Goodrum spoke to the mechanics in the simplified, encouraging language that a skilled teacher uses to instruct children who are just learning to read, or that a speech therapist adopts to guide stroke victims struggling to speak again. Did the mechanics realize, she said, that credit card companies and mortgage lenders give special consideration to laid-off workers? She held up a "sample letter to a creditor" in which the writer announces his layoff, says he expects to be working again in three months and proposes to reduce his payments in the meantime. "It is very important that you negotiate now," she said, "and not when you are 60 days behind on a debt."
When Mrs. Goodrum had finished outlining in step-by-step detail the various survival strategies, Ben Nunnally, then 44 and the president of Lodge 2294, rose and without moving from behind the head table inserted into the proceedings some impromptu advice of his own, exercising his authority one last time as their union leader. While he had the mechanics in one room, Mr. Nunnally said, he wanted to caution them about the unemployment checks they would soon be getting. If they did not file promptly on Jan. 25, their last day, they could waste two weeks in collecting the first check.
Even if the unemployment pay arrived on time, it would be little enough: $336 a week for 26 weeks, way below the nearly $1,100 a week or so that the mechanics had been earning at United. Mr. Nunnally, however, made no mention of either amount. "We have no choice but to offer as little conflict as possible with United and hope that will avoid more layoffs," he said afterward.
It was a wasted hope. Three months later, in April 2003, United abruptly laid off the 1,100 remaining mechanics, including Mr. Nunnally. On May 4, it said it would abandon the maintenance center completely. Outsourcing had won, hands down, and although Mr. Nunnally stayed on as the president of the much-diminished union local, he, too, applied for unemployment pay.
Mr. Nunnally had experienced the center's glory days. He joined United in 1989 as a 30-year-old mechanic in San Francisco and transferred to Indianapolis in 1994, drawn by the lower cost of living and the recently opened center. The mechanics in Indiana worked mostly on Boeing 737's, but as United expanded the operation — opening more repair bays, hiring more mechanics and extending the legs of the L-shaped building until each was nearly a half-mile long — they also overhauled other so-called narrow-body aircraft, including Airbus 319's and 320's and the larger Boeing 757's.
With morale high in the 1990's and the mechanics willing to work hard, they put airliners through their periodic overhauls in record time. The stem-to-stern refurbishing of a 737 normally required 22 days at other maintenance centers. The mechanics at Indianapolis cut that to 11 days for a 737 going through its first heavy maintenance and to less than 20 days for older planes. "We had overhaul bays that kind of competed in a friendly way to see who could do the best," said Frederick L. Mohr, general manager of the Indianapolis center from 1997 until 2002.
The rapid turnaround meant an infusion of passenger revenue from the additional days that the plane was in service, helping to justify the mechanics' pay of $26 an hour in the late 1990's.
Capitalizing on the growing productivity, United itself got into outsourcing as a means of keeping the giant center busy during slack periods in its own operations. America West was sending 737's and 757's to Indianapolis for heavy maintenance, and by the spring of 1999 the work force had grown to 2,400 mechanics from fewer than 250 when Mr. Nunnally arrived in 1994. The fast turnarounds and reliable work justified the relatively high fees that United charged, and America West shifted maintenance to Indianapolis from a private, less expensive contractor in Portland, Ore., whose mechanics earned less.
It was outsourcing in reverse, an American victory in the global competition. "We had people visiting us from Europe to see what we were doing," Mr. Mohr said.
What these visitors saw as they approached the maintenance center was a strikingly futuristic light gray structure, trimmed jauntily in blue, that had risen in the rolling, grassy fields on the far side of the runways, opposite the terminal. The soaring entrance hall, designed to suggest a giant airliner cabin without seats, reflected the efficiencies that were built into nearly every aspect of the building. The mechanics came and went through this hall, where before or after a shift or during a meal break, they took care of nonproductive chores: banking at a credit union, visiting a personnel office, shopping at a small store.
On the eve of the closing, only Hangar 1A was active. A 737 was parked there, its interior gutted. It was the last airliner United would recondition in Indianapolis, and David Doucey, the maintenance center's operations manager, said matter-of-factly that although the mechanics had already received their layoff notices, they would finish the job seven or eight days faster than any other center could.
Parts from the dismantled interior were spread out on an unpainted wooden floor, a mezzanine that fit snugly around the plane just below the wings and stretched out 200 feet on either side. The servicing of many components removed from the cabin and cockpit took place there, eliminating the time required to send them to workshops elsewhere — the practice at other centers.
The time-saving features were numerous, and Mr. Doucey pointed them out. Hydraulic devices erect scaffolding around the plane in an hour, rather than the four hours required elsewhere. Parts are ordered by computer and delivered on an automated miniature railroad, rather than by hand or on bicycles as in other shops. A controlled climate permits mechanics to use fiberglass or graphite composites to patch a plane's outer skin without having to send the sections to special shops.
What drove away America West was the labor trouble that erupted over the Fourth of July weekend in 1999 and then mushroomed into a prolonged slowdown. In retrospect, that weekend was the turning point, the moment when the remarkable efficiencies that had been achieved at Indianapolis began to unwind, and labor-management tensions that had been accumulating suddenly asserted themselves.
IN an earlier era, the two sides would have tried to settle their differences through negotiation and would probably have succeeded. There was really no other alternative. The outsourcing of maintenance did not exist before the 1980's; airlines did their own maintenance. But now layoffs and outsourcing had become an easy and acceptable option. Everywhere in America, the barriers to layoffs came down one after another starting in the late 1970's, and by the turn of the century there was acquiescence.
The incident that started United down the road to outsourcing and layoffs seemed so minor. During the trusting years, the foremen had relaxed the restrictions on the number of mechanics who could take vacation days at the same time. For that Independence Day weekend, more than 100 mechanics had been granted time off — 10 times the prescribed number.
Mr. Mohr, the general manager, was himself on vacation in the days leading up to the weekend, and he called the office to remind his lieutenants to be careful about allowing too many mechanics to be away. Somehow that became a wholesale, last-minute cancellation of vacation time, outraging the mechanics. "To this day, they get upset when they talk about what happened that weekend," Mr. Doucey said.
The uproar over vacations stirred up other resentments — how United had gotten tough about sick days, how it had scaled back flexible hours, how it had substituted an 8-hour shift for a 10-hour one that allowed three- and four-day weekends, which the mechanics preferred.
"Once the vacation thing happened, that ignited a lot of small fires," Mr. Nunnally said. The militants in his local fanned those fires, arguing that the mechanics, because of their unique skills, were special people, essential to airline safety, and that United should be forced to recognize their value.
Mr. Mohr resisted this logic. "Anything we had to do to respond to the business environment was seized upon by the mechanics as something negative," he said. Mr. Nunnally, who was then chairman of the lodge's grievance committee, was caught between management and his members, his leadership challenged by the militants, who numbered nearly 300 mechanics. "I said to Mohr, 'I have to have some wins, too; I can't be beaten in every grievance and do nothing,' " Mr. Nunnally said. "I practically begged him to cooperate, and he could not do that."
BY the fall of 1999, the mechanics were engaged in a slowdown. That is not difficult when airline safety is at issue. If an inspector, drawn from the ranks of the mechanics, finds fault with a newly refurbished wing flap assembly or some other repair, he writes up a ticket reporting the flaw or a potential malfunction; even if there isn't a problem, time has to be spent to investigate the issue to the satisfaction of the Federal Aviation Administration.
As the mechanics had intended, turnaround time inched up, soon reaching 15 days and eventually more than 20 days for a 737. America West stopped sending planes to Indianapolis, as the mechanics had hoped. To regain the lost business, they expected United to restore some of the lost perquisites and thus win back the mechanics' cooperation. Jobs would be preserved, and on the mechanics' terms. That did not happen, and as the slowdown dragged on, work backed up on United's own airliners. For the first time, planes were parked on the tarmac outside the center, out of service — and not generating revenue — while awaiting overhaul.
Then, in July 2000, the mechanics slowed work even more by voting to withhold overtime, to protest what the militants viewed as management's recalcitrance in negotiating a new contract to replace one that had just expired. Mr. Nunnally, as grievance chairman, had spoken against withholding overtime, and worked it himself, in defiance of his militant members, but his point of view did not prevail.
Soon after, the outsourcing began. United diverted work from Indianapolis to private contractors in Alabama and North Carolina, contractors who employed nonunion mechanics — in most cases, at lower wages and with fewer benefits. "The outsourcing was a business decision," Mr. Mohr said. "The cycle time had gotten to the point that if we did not outsource, we would have aircraft continuously parked, waiting for maintenance."
When United and the union finally signed a new contract in March 2002 — 20 months after the old one expired — and the mechanics in Lodge 2294 lifted their ban on overtime, United continued to outsource maintenance, gradually shrinking the operation in Indianapolis. Under the new agreement, the mechanics' combined wages and benefits rose to more than $60 an hour, an increase of roughly $20. While that was the first increase in five years, the new total was double the labor cost of nonunion contractors. It was too big a spread for the mechanics in Indianapolis to overcome — unless they could return to the record turnarounds achieved in the late 1990's. But the old efficiency did not reappear.
Even if it had, the outsourcing would not have stopped, and for a reason quite apart from labor costs. United would not submit again to the leverage over maintenance operations that the mechanics in Indianapolis had exercised. Outsourcing had become too easy an alternative, and the airline crisis that followed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 only encouraged the practice.
What had started as an escape from a unionized, often militant work force took on a second function. The outsourcing of heavy maintenance became a means for the airlines to cut costs, and nearly every major airline gradually moved that way. In an earlier era, before layoffs and outsourcing were acceptable options, United might have weathered the crisis by taking in work from other airlines, as it had once done with America West. But layoffs and outsourcing were now standard practice, and rather than pursue economies of scale, United sought heavy maintenance at the lowest immediate cost. As work shifted away from Indianapolis, the layoffs multiplied.
The 60 mechanics gathered at the Days Inn that January evening were in the fourth wave to lose their jobs, bringing the total to 1,200. The recycling of former mechanics into new lines of work was now in full swing, and Mr. Nunnally, when he had finished speaking about the importance of filing promptly for unemployment benefits, introduced Tori E. Bucko. She turned out to be the main speaker, the chief of the boot camp that the mechanics were being encouraged to enter.
Given her responsibilities, Ms. Bucko was surprisingly young — only 30. But as the manager of a federally subsidized program for processing laid-off airline workers in Indianapolis, she would soon play a more important role in the lives of many of the mechanics than Mr. Nunnally or the union they were leaving behind.
The program that Ms. Bucko directed was sponsored by the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, a coalition of companies, unions, government agencies and civic groups. Virtually all of the funding comes from Washington, which sends less than $7 billion a year to the states to recycle laid-off workers back into jobs. In Indiana's case, the state distributes its share of the federal money to 16 regional work-force investment boards. The Indianapolis Private Industry Council is one of these boards, and the council in turn paid a private, nonprofit company, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, to do the actual work.
Goodwill employed Ms. Bucko as the manager in charge of the recycling program for laid-off airline workers in Marion County, whose boundaries encompass the city of Indianapolis. Goodwill also recycled men and women laid off in other industries in Marion County, recruiting them as they signed up for unemployment benefits at state-run offices. But in the winter of 2003, outcast airline employees, two-thirds of them United's mechanics, were still getting special attention in what was called the AIR Project, the short name for Airline Industry Re-careerment Project, a title that suggests just how awkward and difficult recycling is.
Ms. Bucko's task, in this initial presentation at the Days Inn, was to encourage the 60 mechanics to take the next step. There would be no help for them if they failed to show up at the AIR Project's center, in an industrial park not far from the airport. There, they would be asked to fill out a detailed enrollment application and submit to a series of workshops and evaluations.
What Ms. Bucko did not mention was the pressure on her employer, Goodwill Industries, and on herself, to meet the employment goals specified in the federal grant — to get most of the mechanics re-employed at 90 percent of their previous wage. Meeting this goal was a condition for getting more federal money once the initial grant expired. In the end, Goodwill managed to put together enough money to string out the AIR Project for nearly four years. But the employment goals were not met. They could not be met; they were too optimistic, mythically optimistic.
Ms. Bucko knew that as she struggled to meet the standard. So did Carolyn Brown, vice president of the Indianapolis Private Industry Council, the agency that picked Goodwill Industries to run the project. "When large numbers of people are laid off, there just isn't any occupational cluster that is waiting out there to receive them," Ms. Brown said.
Job training, as a result, became a channeling process, channeling the unemployed into the unfilled jobs that do exist, with a veneer of training along the way. Yet job training is central to employment policy. It has been since 1982, when Congress passed the Job Training Partnership Act at the urging of President Ronald Reagan. President Bill Clinton took job training even further, making it available to higher-income workers — including the aircraft mechanics in Indianapolis.
Saying that the country should solve the skills shortage through education and training became part of nearly every politician's stump speech, an innocuous way to address the politics of unemployment without strengthening either the bargaining leverage of workers or the federal government's role in bolstering labor markets.
But training for what? The reality, as the aircraft mechanics discovered, is painfully different from the reigning wisdom. Rather than having a shortage of skills, millions of American workers have more skills than their jobs require. That is particularly true of college-educated people, who make up 30 percent of the population today, up from 10 percent in the 1960's. They often find themselves working in sales or as office administrators, or taking jobs in hotels and restaurants, or becoming carpenters, flight attendants and word processors.
The number of jobs that require a bachelor's degree has indeed been growing, but more slowly than the number of graduates, according to the Labor Department, and that trend is likely to continue through this decade. "The average college graduate is doing very well," said Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. "But on the margin, college graduates appear to be more vulnerable than in the past."
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a rough estimate of the imbalance in the demand for jobs as opposed to the supply. Each month since December 2000, it has surveyed the number of job vacancies across the country and compared it with the number of unemployed job seekers. On average, there were 2.6 job seekers for every job opening over the first 41 months of the survey. That ratio would have been even higher, according to the bureau, if the calculation had included the millions of people who stopped looking for work because they did not believe that they could get decent jobs.
So the demand for jobs is considerably greater than the supply, and the supply is not what the reigning theory says it is. Most of the unfilled jobs pay low wages and require relatively little skill, often less than the jobholder has. From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004, for example, more than 55 percent of the hiring was at wages of $13.25 an hour or less: hotel and restaurant workers, health care employees, temporary replacements and the like.
That trend is likely to continue. Seven of the 10 occupations expected to grow the fastest from 2002 through 2012, according to the Labor Department, pay less than $13.25 an hour, on average: retail salesclerks, customer service representatives, food service workers, cashiers, janitors, nurse's aides and hospital orderlies.
The $13.25 threshold is important. More than 45 percent of the nation's workers, whatever their skills, earned less than $13.25 an hour in 2004, or $27,600 a year for a full-time worker. That is roughly the income that a family of four must have in many parts of the country to maintain a standard of living minimally above the poverty level. Surely lack of skill and education does not hold down the wages of nearly half the work force.
Something quite different seems to be true: the oversupply of skilled workers is driving people into jobs beneath their skills and driving down the pay of jobs equal to their skills. Both happened to the aircraft mechanics laid off by United.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Friday, March 24, 2006
Letter to the Secretary - New York Times
Letter to the Secretary - New York Times
The New York Times
March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Letter to the Secretary
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
Dear John Snow, secretary of the Treasury:
I'm glad that you've started talking about income inequality, which in
recent years has reached levels not seen since before World War II. But if
you want
to be credible on the subject, you need to make some changes in your
approach.
First, you shouldn't claim, as you seemed to earlier this week, that there's
anything meaningful about the decline in some measures of inequality between
2000 and 2003. Every economist realizes that, as The Washington Post put it,
"much of the decline in inequality during that period reflected the popping
of the stock market bubble," which led to a large but temporary fall in the
incomes of the richest Americans.
We don't have detailed data for more recent years yet, but the available
indicators suggest that after 2003, incomes at the top and the overall level
of
inequality came roaring back. That surge in inequality explains why, despite
your best efforts to talk up the economic numbers, most Americans are
unhappy
with the Bush economy.
I find it helpful to illustrate what's going on with a hypothetical example:
say 10 middle-class guys are sitting in a bar. Then the richest guy leaves,
and Bill Gates walks in.
Because the richest guy in the bar is now much richer than before, the
average income in the bar soars. But the income of the nine men who aren't
Bill Gates
hasn't increased, and no amount of repeating "But average income is up!"
will convince them that they're better off.
Now think about what happened in 2004 (the figures for 2005 aren't in yet,
but it was almost certainly more of the same). The economy grew reasonably
fast
in 2004, but most families saw little if any improvement in their financial
situation.
Instead, a small fraction of the population got much, much richer. For
example, Forbes tells us that the compensation of chief executives at the
500 largest
corporations rose 54 percent in 2004. In effect, Bill Gates walked into the
bar. Average income rose, but only because of rising incomes at the top.
Speaking of executive compensation, Mr. Snow, it hurts your credibility when
you say, as you did in a recent interview, that soaring pay for top
executives
reflects their productivity and that we should "trust the marketplace."
Executive pay isn't set in the marketplace; it's set by boards that the
executives
themselves appoint. And executives' pay often bears little relationship to
their performance.
You yourself, as you must know, are often cited as an example. When you were
appointed to your present job, Forbes pointed out that the performance of
the
company you had run, CSX, was "middling at best." Nonetheless, you were "by
far the highest-paid chief in the industry."
And the business careers of other prominent members of the administration,
including the president and vice president, seem to demonstrate the truth of
the adage that it's not what you know, it's who you know. So my advice on
the question of executive pay is: don't go there.
Finally, you should stop denying that the Bush tax cuts favor the wealthy. I
know that administration number-crunchers have produced calculations
purporting
to show that the tax cuts were tilted toward the middle class. But using the
right measure - the effect of the tax cuts on after-tax income - the bias
toward the haves and have-mores is unmistakable.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, once the Bush tax cuts are
fully phased in, they will raise the after-tax income of middle-income
families
by 2.3 percent. But they will raise the after-tax income of people like
yourself, with incomes of more than $1 million, by 7.3 percent.
And those calculations don't take into account the indirect effects of tax
cuts. If the tax cuts are made permanent, they'll eventually have to be
offset
by large spending cuts. In practical terms, that means cuts where the money
is: in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Since middle-income Americans
will feel the brunt of these cuts, yet received a relatively small tax
break, they'll end up worse off. But the wealthy will be left considerably
wealthier.
Of course, my suggestions about how to improve your credibility would force
you to stop repeating administration talking points. But you're the
secretary
of the Treasury. Your job is to make economic policy, not to spout
propaganda. Oh, wait.
Posted by Miriam V
But They Voted For This Government....
Pressure Grows to Free Afghan Convert By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writer
The Afghan government faced heavy international pressure Friday to reconsider the charges against an Afghan man who faces a possible death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity — and reports emerged that the man might be freed soon.
Pressure against the case has been building, and the Afghan government may be rethinking the charges against Abdul Rahman. A government official and MSNBC said Friday that Rahman may be freed within the next few days.
"He could be released soon," an Afghan government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the case to the media.
MSNBC, citing an Afghan diplomatic official it did not identify, said Rahman, 41, could be released Monday. The British Broadcasting Corp. said government officials were meeting Saturday to discuss the case.
Senior clerics in the Afghan capital have voiced strong support for prosecuting Rahman and again warned Friday they would incite people to kill him unless he reverted to Islam.
Ansarullah Mawlavi Zada, the chief among three judges trying the case, asserted the autonomy of the court.
"We have constitution and law here. Nobody has the right to put pressure on us," he told the AP.
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, meanwhile, joined the chorus of Western leaders expressing outrage over the prosecution and said he would protest personally to President Hamid Karzai.
"This is appalling. When I saw the report about this I felt sick literally," Howard told an Australian radio network Friday. "The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief."
Rahman faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for converting 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
Karzai's office has declined to comment on the case, which has put the Afghan leader in an awkward position.
Karzai took power after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime in a U.S.-led war in late 2001 and relies on international forces to maintain his still-shaky grip on the country.
But he would be reluctant to offend Islamic sensibilities at home or alienate religious conservatives wielding considerable power.
Diplomats have said the Afghan government is searching for a way to drop the case. On Wednesday, authorities said Rahman is suspected of being mentally ill and would undergo psychological examinations to see whether he is fit to stand trial.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Karzai on Thursday, seeking a "favorable resolution" of the case. She said Washington looked forward to that "in the very near future."
Senior clerics condemned Rahman as an apostate.
Rahman had "committed the greatest sin" by converting to Christianity and deserved to be killed, cleric Abdul Raoulf said in a sermon Friday at Herati Mosque.
"God's way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate," he told about 150 worshippers.
Another cleric, Ayatullah Asife Muhseni, told a gathering of preachers and intellectuals at a Kabul hotel that the Afghan president had no right to overturn the punishment of an apostate.
He also demanded that clerics be able to question Rahman in jail to discover why he had converted to Christianity. He suggested it could have been the result of a conspiracy by Western nations or Jews.
At a fruit market in Kabul, many ordinary Afghans said they supported the death penalty, but some wanted more investigation before meting out the punishment.
"In the past 30 years, so many Afghans have been killed in name of communism, Taliban and politics or for robbery. It's enough Afghans killed," said Ghulam Mohammed, 45, a former army officer. Clerics should talk to him (Rahman) and bring him to the right way."
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
The Afghan government faced heavy international pressure Friday to reconsider the charges against an Afghan man who faces a possible death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity — and reports emerged that the man might be freed soon.
Pressure against the case has been building, and the Afghan government may be rethinking the charges against Abdul Rahman. A government official and MSNBC said Friday that Rahman may be freed within the next few days.
"He could be released soon," an Afghan government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the case to the media.
MSNBC, citing an Afghan diplomatic official it did not identify, said Rahman, 41, could be released Monday. The British Broadcasting Corp. said government officials were meeting Saturday to discuss the case.
Senior clerics in the Afghan capital have voiced strong support for prosecuting Rahman and again warned Friday they would incite people to kill him unless he reverted to Islam.
Ansarullah Mawlavi Zada, the chief among three judges trying the case, asserted the autonomy of the court.
"We have constitution and law here. Nobody has the right to put pressure on us," he told the AP.
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, meanwhile, joined the chorus of Western leaders expressing outrage over the prosecution and said he would protest personally to President Hamid Karzai.
"This is appalling. When I saw the report about this I felt sick literally," Howard told an Australian radio network Friday. "The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief."
Rahman faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for converting 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
Karzai's office has declined to comment on the case, which has put the Afghan leader in an awkward position.
Karzai took power after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime in a U.S.-led war in late 2001 and relies on international forces to maintain his still-shaky grip on the country.
But he would be reluctant to offend Islamic sensibilities at home or alienate religious conservatives wielding considerable power.
Diplomats have said the Afghan government is searching for a way to drop the case. On Wednesday, authorities said Rahman is suspected of being mentally ill and would undergo psychological examinations to see whether he is fit to stand trial.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Karzai on Thursday, seeking a "favorable resolution" of the case. She said Washington looked forward to that "in the very near future."
Senior clerics condemned Rahman as an apostate.
Rahman had "committed the greatest sin" by converting to Christianity and deserved to be killed, cleric Abdul Raoulf said in a sermon Friday at Herati Mosque.
"God's way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate," he told about 150 worshippers.
Another cleric, Ayatullah Asife Muhseni, told a gathering of preachers and intellectuals at a Kabul hotel that the Afghan president had no right to overturn the punishment of an apostate.
He also demanded that clerics be able to question Rahman in jail to discover why he had converted to Christianity. He suggested it could have been the result of a conspiracy by Western nations or Jews.
At a fruit market in Kabul, many ordinary Afghans said they supported the death penalty, but some wanted more investigation before meting out the punishment.
"In the past 30 years, so many Afghans have been killed in name of communism, Taliban and politics or for robbery. It's enough Afghans killed," said Ghulam Mohammed, 45, a former army officer. Clerics should talk to him (Rahman) and bring him to the right way."
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
Good Versus Evil Isn't A Strategy
by Madeleine Albright
THE BUSH administration's newly unveiled National Security Strategy might well be subtitled "The Irony of Iran." Three years after the invasion of Iraq and the invention of the phrase "axis of evil," the administration now highlights the threat posed by Iran — whose radical government has been vastly strengthened by the invasion of Iraq. This is more tragedy than strategy, and it reflects the Manichean approach this administration has taken to the world.
It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.
Read the whole story here.
THE BUSH administration's newly unveiled National Security Strategy might well be subtitled "The Irony of Iran." Three years after the invasion of Iraq and the invention of the phrase "axis of evil," the administration now highlights the threat posed by Iran — whose radical government has been vastly strengthened by the invasion of Iraq. This is more tragedy than strategy, and it reflects the Manichean approach this administration has taken to the world.
It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.
Read the whole story here.
Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement
Published on Friday, March 24, 2006 by the Boston Globe
In addendum to law, he says oversight rules are not binding
by Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON - When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations.
Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush's expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to ''faithfully execute" them.
Several senators have proposed bills to bring the warrantless surveillance program under the law. One Democrat, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, has gone so far as to propose censuring Bush, saying he has broken the wiretapping law.
Bush's signing statement on the USA Patriot Act nearly went unnoticed.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.
Yesterday, Leahy said Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act -- provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress -- represented ''nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."
''The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word," Leahy said in a prepared statement. ''The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."
The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply ''very standard language" that is ''used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required."
''The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. ''The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the statement may simply be ''bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act.
But, he said, the statement illustrates the administration's ''mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power.
''On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping, and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism," Golove said.
In addendum to law, he says oversight rules are not binding
by Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON - When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations.
Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush's expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to ''faithfully execute" them.
Several senators have proposed bills to bring the warrantless surveillance program under the law. One Democrat, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, has gone so far as to propose censuring Bush, saying he has broken the wiretapping law.
Bush's signing statement on the USA Patriot Act nearly went unnoticed.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.
Yesterday, Leahy said Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act -- provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress -- represented ''nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."
''The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word," Leahy said in a prepared statement. ''The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."
The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply ''very standard language" that is ''used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required."
''The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. ''The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the statement may simply be ''bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act.
But, he said, the statement illustrates the administration's ''mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power.
''On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping, and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism," Golove said.
Fw: Outsourcing
----- Original Message -----
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Cc: <ATROYNY@aol.com>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 9:09 AM
Subject: FWD: Outsourcing
Subj: Fwd: Outsourcing
Date: 3/23/2006 5:41:24 PM Eastern Standard Time
OUTSOURCING
Congress today announced that the office of President of the United
States of America will be outsourced as of April 1, 2006. The move is being
made
to save the $400K yearly salary and a record $521 billion in deficit
expenditures and related overhead the office has incurred during the last 5
years.
"The cost savings should be significant," stated Congressman Thomas
Reynolds (R-WA). Reynolds, with the aid of the Government Accounting Office,
has
studied outsourcing of American jobs extensively. "We cannot expect to
remain
competitive on the world stage with the current level of cash outlay,"
Reynolds noted. Preparations have been underway for some time and Mr. Bush
was
informed by email this morning of his termination.
Gurvinder Singh of Indus Teleservices, Mumbai, India, will be assuming
the office of President as of April 1st. Mr. Singh was born in the United
States while his Pakistani parents were vacationing at Niagara Falls, thus
making
him eligible for the position. He will receive a salary of US$320 a month,
with no health coverage or other benefits. It is believed that Mr. Singh
will be
able to handle his responsibilities without a support staff. Due to the time
difference between the US and India, he will work primarily at night, when
few offices of the US Government will be open so he should suffer few, if
any,
interruptions.
"Working nights will also allow me to keep my day job at the American
Express call center," stated Mr. Singh in an exclusive interview. "I am
excited
about this position. I always hoped I would be President someday."
A Congressional spokesperson noted that while Mr. Singh may not be fully
aware of all the issues involved in the office of President. He will rely
upon
a script tree and can address common concerns, without having to understand
the underlying issues at all. "We know these scripting tools work," stated
the
spokesperson, "President Bush has used them successfully for years."
Following a two week waiting period after his final day in office,
Bush will be eligible for $240 a week in unemployment pay for 13 weeks. He
will
not be eligible for Medicaid, as his unemployment benefits will exceed the
allowed limit.
Mr. Bush has been provided the services of Manpower, Inc. to help him
write a resume and prepare for his upcoming job transition. A Greeter
position at
Wal-Mart was suggested due to Bush's extensive experience shaking hands and
smiling no matter what the circumstances. Another possibility is Bush's
re-enlistment in the Texas Air National Guard. His prior records are
conspicuously
vague but should he choose this option, he would likely be stationed in Waco
for a month, before being sent to Iraq, a country he has visited. "I've been
there, I know all about Iraq," stated Mr. Bush, who gained invaluable
knowledge
of the country in a visit to the Baghdad Airport 's terminal and gift shop.
Sources in Baghdad and Falluja say Mr. Bush would receive a tremendous
welcome from local Iraqis. They have asked to be provided with details of
his
arrival so they might arrange an appropriate blast.
AND IN UNRELATED NEWS:
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A White House source stated that Congress is considering
awarding Vice-President Dick Cheney the Medal of Freedom, the national
highest
civilian commendation, for his act of bravery in shooting an attorney. The
source was quoted to say " All Americans have wanted to shoot a lawyer at
one
time or another and Cheney actually had the balls to do it".
In a related story, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which issues
hunting licenses, said that it will start requiring hunters, wishing to bag
a
lawyer, to have the new "lawyer's stamp" on their hunting license. Currently
Texas hunters are required to carry stamps for hunting birds, deer, and
bear, at
a cost of $7 annually. The new "lawyers stamp" will cost $100, but open
season will be all year long. The department further stated that although
the
"lawyers stamp" comes at a hefty price, sales have been brisk and it
believes it
will generate annual revenues in excess of $3 billion the first year. Other
states are considering similar hunting license stamps.
How long can you tread water?
Earth's warming likely irreversible
Sea levels may rise 13 to 20 feet; Climate change to hit Asia, Africa and poor worst .
Sea levels may rise 13 to 20 feet; Climate change to hit Asia, Africa and poor worst .
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