Lieberman To Raise Money For The GOP

Outsourcing War

Jeremy Scahill described the impact of private military contractors on the Iraq War to a House subcommittee Thursday. Here's the full text of his remarks and watch the video.

Giuliani For Sale

On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich.

Billions Of Dollars In Oil Money Missing In Iraq

House Republicans comfort poor, poor Gonzales
By Joe Conason

While the Suckers Cheer....

The New York Times

May 12, 2007
About New York
The Rings of Giuliani
By JIM DWYER

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who after deep reflection has concluded that he is the best qualified person in America to be president, now owns four gold World Series rings, which, if hit hard enough with a hammer, would yield about 100 diamonds, some of them a half-carat in size.

The rings were created by the New York Yankees baseball team to commemorate their championships from 1996 to 2000. Mr. Giuliani says he bought them fair and square for a total of $16,000 — “I paid precisely what anyone else would pay” — and that he scored the baubles only after he left office.

Well.

Actually, he could not have paid what anyone else would pay because the team does not sell the rings to anyone. The whole point of World Series rings is that they cannot be bought. Moreover, on the rare occasions when they have gone on the private market, they have drawn prices many times what Mr. Giuliani paid the Yankees.

Still, as endlessly fascinating as money and jewelry can be, they are but accessories to the ego.

During his eight years in office, Mr. Giuliani played the role of First Fan of the Yankees, a kind of team mascot perched in the best box seats in the ballpark, his image glimpsed just over the shoulder of some Yankee star whenever TV cameras pointed to the on-deck circle.

How much and when Mr. Giuliani paid for those choice seats is apparently a complicated state secret: The Yankees say they did sporadically receive checks from him for his tickets, but they won’t say for how much or how often. Mr. Giuliani’s spokeswoman said he paid “thousands of dollars” when he was not at games on “official business,” a term of liberal elasticity.

As mayor, he actually did have one large piece of official business involving the Yankees: He served as the team’s landlord. Yankee Stadium was built and paid for by the people of New York, and is part of the Parks and Recreation Department’s portfolio. The Yankee baseball team is a tenant of the city.

For naked obstructionism, for sheer contentiousness — for late payments, underpayments, no payments — the Yankees have few peers among long-term occupants of city property. One year, the team tried to lower its rent by claiming that it had paid an engineer — one man — to work 168 hours a week for six straight weeks. That is the numerical equivalent of 24/7. In seasons when millions of people arrived, the team managed to pay less in rent for the use of Yankee Stadium than the residents of the nearby St. Mary’s public housing project paid in a month.

During Mr. Giuliani’s last years in office and into 2002, the team tried to get out of about $3.5 million in rent by shaving the revenue it reported for concessions, ticket sales and cable income, and by trying to claim deductions for money it owed to Major League Baseball. These maneuvers were spotted by the office of City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr.

The Yankees may have 26 championships, but no one has ever given the team a gold ring for being good tenants.

Nevertheless, in his final hours in office, Mr. Giuliani, the landlord/First Fan, helped the team by approving amendments to its lease with the city, including one signed on the steps of City Hall while bagpipers played a final salute to the mayor, as Wayne Barrett reported in this week’s Village Voice. These were quickly rescinded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg when he took office.

Mr. Giuliani, now a wealthy man, probably does not need to make sweetheart deals for jewelry, even if that’s what his transaction with the Yankees looks like. The 1996 Yankee World Series ring, with a half-carat diamond at its center and 23 diamonds around the outside, was described in published reports in May 1997 as being worth $8,000.

Mr. Giuliani paid $2,500 for his seven years later, which is what the ring cost the team, said Alice McGillion, a spokeswoman for the Yankees. For the three other championship rings, the Yankees say Mr. Giuliani paid the team’s cost, a total of $13,500. But reporters were told years ago that the 1998 ring by itself was worth $15,000.

The rings and free tickets are a reminder of a quality that overtook his administration in its final years: the common human fallacy of infallibility. Whatever good guys did was, by definition, good. We do it, therefore, it’s O.K.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

• Fort Dix Six may rely on entrapment defense

Blair’s Bittersweet Exit

by E.J. Dionne —

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s announcement that he’s stepping down won’t quell the anger felt on so much of the anti-war left. But my own reaction is a deep sadness that he tarnished a formidable legacy.

Republicans play politics with war funding

By Joan Walsh

Giuliani Firm Advised Fraudulent OxyContin Makers

GOP’s Reaganesque Tall Tales

by Joe Conason —

Sensing their own smallness, contemporary politicians often seek to puff themselves up by appealing to myth and legend. For Republicans, there is no mythology more appealing than that of Ronald Wilson Reagan, as the party’s presidential candidates eagerly demonstrated during their May 3 debate in the library that bears his name.

The Scum Also Rises

Robert Scheer invokes Kurt Vonnegut to explain why arrogant incompentents like Paul Wolfowitz and George Tenet rose to power.

Karl Rove's big election-fraud hoax

Republican manipulation of the polls long predates the U.S. attorneys plot -- and the U.S. voting system needs an overhaul

By Garrett Epps

The Struggle Over Iraqi Oil

A proposed oil law reveals that the White House's eyes are still on the country's petroleum prize. Michael Schwartz, TomDispatch.


• Also from Mother Jones: James Ridgeway on Iraq's giveaway to Big Oil
and Robert Dreyfuss on the neocon thirst for black gold.

Condi Rice never looks back

That attitude, says Marcus Mabry in his new biography of the secretary of state, has seriously harmed the United States.

By Joe Conason

Condi Snoozed While Chevron Paid Off Saddam

by Jeff Ballinger

Because she's a Russia scholar, Secretary Rice will be quite familiar with Lenin's term, "useful idiot." Near the end of her decade on Chevron's board (she joined it in 1991 while a professor at Stanford University), the corporation cooked up the very responsible-sounding "The Chevron Way to a Strong Board." As chairman of the "Public Policy Committee," she should have been tuned in to the open secret of kickbacks being paid to Saddam starting in June 2000 (everyone in the industry knew, according to investigators quoted in this morning's International Herald Tribune).


While she left the board to head the National Security Council seven months later, there was plenty of time to keep Chevron from buying millions of barrels of crude from Iraq and sending around $20 million to Saddam's private accounts and "pet projects" like aiding Russian whacko bigot, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.


"The Chevron Way to a Strong Board", after all, emphasized "ensuring that management and the CEO lay the company's problems out on the table," according to CEO at the time, Kenneth Derr. Sounds really thoughtful and, like most Corporate Social Responsibility blather, aimed at concrete problems. Problem is, even the top officials can be faked out or lack interest in flagging the most blatant acts of cupidity.



Chevron will pay around $25 million to settle the charges - an amount the company will recoup hundreds of times over if the Iraq oil law goes forward with Production Sharing Agreements in the legislation.


In a more just world, such a spectacular failure of "Corporate Social Responsibility" would occasion a spate of investigative reports about how other corporations (shoe, apparel, electronics, toys, etc.) are cheating workers or abusing the environment while pledging that contractors are "clean" and "green." Maybe a Democratic candidate will pick up on the issue.

A Modest Proposal
by Larry Beinhart

Draft the war supporters. Send them to Iraq. Let them put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. They deserve it. We deserve it. The good people of Iraq deserve it.

How many American soldiers have died outside Iraq? Ask MetaFilter

How many American soldiers who served in this Iraq war have died since leaving Iraq (German hospitals, American hospitals, at home etc.) ?
Some unverified reports have the number as high as 7,500.

They purposely don't release that information. For a dead soldier to be an Iraq casualty, he or she has to die in Iraq. If you're airlifted out to Germany and die there, you're not an Iraq casualty.And then, just lately, they've started redefining civilian casualties as being 'ones that aren't killed by car bombs or explosive devices'. If at first you don't succeed, redefine casualty.

Bill Clinton Warns on Disaster Preparedness

Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates might do well to heed the cautionary advice of former President Bill Clinton, who warned of coming disasters of both the man-made and natural varieties. He spoke during a conference Friday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.