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=> What a leaky tire will get you...

Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Thursday, June 16 2005, 6:15:06 (CEST)
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...I went in to the local Belle Tire shop to get my leaking tire patched. While I was waiting, I picked up the Detroit Free Press, and found three gems which I would like to share with y'all. The first was a letter to the editor.

"
War and profit

I'm a father, a businessperson, a lifelong Catholic and a Vietnam infantry veteran. I woke up to my military experience two years ago, and I've spent extensive time researching war, the military, politicians and business. The bottom line for me is summed up by two-time Medal of Honor recipient Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler. After completing his career, he looked back and said: "War is a racket."

Military recruiters are doing their job, just as Butler did, just as I did. But the results of these jobs are the continuation of death and destruction as a means to resolve conflicts.

The only protection the military has is for we the people to speak up. The military is not "service" to the country. The military is a pawn, used by politicians and the mega-rich to gain markets and generate billions in profits.

Before you send your kids to the military, do the research. If the military is such a great career, then the children of the politicians and the mega-rich should be swelling the ranks, and recruiters would be unnecessary. Actions speak louder than words.

Arnold Stieber

Grass Lake "

The second is an article:

JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY: How McCain went to taxpayers' defense

June 15, 2005

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Almost everyone was on board and the deal, a little bit of corporate welfare that would only cost the American taxpayers around $23.5 billion plus an additional $5 billion for routine maintenance, was a slam dunk.

Who could stand against the lobbying heft and suasion of the Boeing Co., the Air Force, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and at least one of his right-hand men, key members of the House and Senate and powerful people in the White House?

Anyone inside the Pentagon who spoke against the plan to lease 100 Boeing 767 aircraft fitted out as aerial refueling tankers at a price per plane that was higher than actually buying them would be crushed. Anyone outside the Pentagon who spoke would be crushed by fast counter-attack or stonewalled.

And so it would have gone had it not been for one man who thought the tanker deal stank like rotten fish and was willing to go to war with power brokers inside his own Republican Party.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona wanted answers from Boeing and the Air Force, and when confronted with that Pentagon stone wall, he unleashed the only arrow in his quiver: He put a hold on every civilian nominee for a position in the Department of Defense as well as critical uniformed appointments within the Air Force hierarchy, some of them for more than 18 months.

Boeing was the first to cave, turning over thousands of pages of internal and external e-mails that exposed how rotten the tanker deal really was.

When Boeing's plane could not meet the list of operational requirements for an Air Force tanker, the document was rewritten so that ONLY Boeing's aircraft could meet the now lowered operational standards. The e-mails were from powerful men, and one powerful woman, in Boeing, the Air Force, the Pentagon and the White House.

The Air Force's chief negotiator, Darleen Druyun, dubbed the Dragon Lady by those who had to deal with her, was only critical of Boeing for failing to demand higher prices -- and she saw to it that the company got more than it had sought.

Druyun was simultaneously negotiating her own post-retirement job with Boeing and got one worth a quarter-million a year when she walked out of the Pentagon.

The Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge, made his own contribution to the cause just before he walked out of the Pentagon revolving door and into a post on the board of defense industry giant Lockheed Martin: Aldridge signed the document approving the lease deal and then ordered the Air Force acquisitions chief, Marvin Sambur, to exempt this contract from normal Pentagon safeguards and oversight.

Over on the Hill, McCain wrote letter after letter demanding information from the Air Force and Defense Department. He demanded investigations of the darkest corners of a deal that was a barely disguised hijacking of the U.S. Treasury. And he demanded that the Air Force turn over its internal e-mail traffic.

Others on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, including the chairman, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and minority leader Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., began signing some of those letters with McCain.

When the auditors of the Defense Department inspector general's office turned in their report last year assessing the Boeing tanker deal as a bad one, Warner leaned forward and asked the chief auditor: "How long have you been doing this job?"

The auditor: "Thirty-three years, sir."

Warner: "Have you ever seen a deal as dirty as this one in that time?"

The auditor: "No sir, I have not."

Darleen Druyun pleaded guilty to her part in the scandal and was sentenced to nine months in federal prison last October. The Boeing official who hired Druyun, treasurer Michael Sears, likewise pleaded guilty to federal charges. The Boeing chief executive officer at the time resigned.

Recently, the inspector general went before Senate Armed Services to brief senators about his latest investigation of the deal -- a hard look at whose fingerprints were on the key decisions inside the Air Force and inside the Pentagon.

The report says that Air Force Secretary James Roche, who left the Pentagon late last year, told the investigators that Rumsfeld personally urged him in July 2003 to stand firm on the deal: "He did not want me to budge on the tanker lease proposal."

Not since the days of the $400 toilet seat and the $800 hammer have we seen so blatant an attempted rip-off of taxpayer money, and the Boeing deal is only the tip of the iceberg. Druyun told prosecutors, as she cut her deal for leniency, that she herself had cooked the books on nine other big Pentagon contracts.

At least a few military-industrial complex pirates have learned not to mess with John McCain. He has a bulldog bite and he won't let go until they scream "uncle" or perhaps "guilty."

JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Write to him at Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994.

The third is an editorial article:

MOLLY IVINS: The hyper-rich getting a break?

June 14, 2005

BY MOLLY IVINS

David Cay Johnston, the invaluable New York Times reporter who special-

izes in our tax system, has come up with some stagger-

ing figures on what he

calls "the hyper-rich," the wealthiest one-thousandth

of the population, and their taxes.

•"The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980. ... The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell."

•"Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest income -- a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data -- now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000."

•"Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."

•"The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the Bush tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million -- thousands and even tens of thousands annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax."

•Under the Bush tax plan, according to a Times editorial, by 2015, those making between $80,000 and $400,000 will pay as much as 13.9 percentage points more in federal taxes than those making more, assuming the tax cuts are made permanent.

Whenever I write about such matters, the brethren on the right accuse me of "fomenting class warfare" or of unseemly envy of the rich. Why should I give a fig if 338,400 households with more than $10 million are having a high old time? Because of the numbers.

According to Johnston, that group has grown by more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent.

This has nothing to do with envy -- Paris Hilton strikes me more as a subject for pity, and I actually admire Bill Gates and George Soros. It is about what is happening to this society.

When the rules are increasingly fixed to benefit only a few ridiculously wealthy people, that leaves guess who with a larger portion of the tax tab.

And we are talking serious money.

In addition to paying the same percentage of their income as those in the $50,000 to $75,000 range, the hyper-rich are very good at finding ways -- both legal and illegal, observes Johnston -- of sheltering a lot of income even from the taxes they are supposed to pay.

The Texas billionaires and Bush buddies Charles and Sam Wyly are now under investigation by the IRS, SEC and Manhattan district attorney concerning a tax-shelter plan run out of the Isle of Man, according to the Independent of Britain.

Look, Medicare is being cut, Pell grants are way down, food stamps are being cut -- every day we get news from Washington that some new measure hurting the poor or the middle class has been put in place. At the same time, the country is running up a monstrous debt that will be passed to our children.

This is ruinous folly. This is not about class envy, it is about ridiculous, unfair and harmful public policy.

The Times has also been running a series on class in America.

The bad news is that social mobility in this country -- the old Horatio Alger idea that we can get rich by working hard -- is less true now than it ever was. It turns out the American dream of moving up is now more likely to occur in Britain and France, those supposedly class-riddled countries.

I suggest this has happened in large part because our government now functions as a fully paid arm of the wealthy and of corporate interests. The country is becoming internally calcified.

When Republican cuts to programs for veterans, troops, education or health care come up, U.S. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., has regularly offered amendments to restore funding and pay for it by reducing (not eliminating) the Bush tax cuts to the hyper-rich slightly.

Every time, the Republicans vote to keep the tax cuts for the millionaires and let the troops or education take the hit.

What Johnston's study shows is that the hyper-rich are now taking advantage of the merely rich. So now what will the Republicans do?

MOLLY IVINS' column is distributed by Creators Syndicate. Write to her at 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

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