The JvL Bi

The JvL Bi-Weekly

James van Luik

Publisher & Editor & Compiler

Please forward the Bi-weekly to any who might be interested

Wednesday, March 31^st , 2004

Volume 3, No. 6

["We do not seek the destruction of Iraq. Nor do we seek to punish the Iraqi people for the decisions and policies of their leaders." President George W. Bush

We think the price is worth it…

US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, when asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were a price worth paying for sanctions

"They know we own their country … we dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

Brigadier-General William Looney, US Air Force,

Director of the bombing of Iraq]

9 Articles

1. The Crime Committed in Our Name

2. The Assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

3. Voices on Iraq: Noam Chomsky Interviewed

4. Zapatero to Kerry: Back off, Senator, Our Troops Are Coming Home

5. Don't Get Duped Out of Your Social Security

6. Student Coalition Launches National Campaign Against Secret University Investments

7. Greg Palast

8. Global Warming Spirals Upwards

9. Republicans and Democrats, Hand in Hand

1. THE CRIME COMMITTED IN OUR NAME

JOHN PILGER

The invasion of Iraq, which began one year ago today (3/22/04), was "organized with lies," says the new Spanish Prime Minister. Does any one doubt this any more?

And yet these proven lies are still dominant in Australia. Day after day, their perpetrators seek to obfuscate and justify an unprovoked, illegal attack that killed up to 55,000 people, including at least 10,000 civilians; that every month causes the death and injury of 1000 children from exploding cluster bombs; that has so saturated Iraqi towns and cities with uranium that American and British soldiers are warned not to go where Iraqi children play, for fear of contamination.

Set the carnage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that act of terrorism was, it was small compared with the terrorism of the American-led "coalition." Yes, terrorism. How strange it reads when it describes the actions of "our" governments. So saturated are we in the West in the devilry of Third World tyrants (most of them the products of Western imperialism) that we have lost all sense of the enormous crime committed in our name.

This is not rhetoric. In 1946, the judges who tried the German leadership at Nuremberg called the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country "the supreme international war crime." That principle guided more than half a century of international law, until bush and Blair and Howard tore it up, covering their actions with a litany of lies.

On February 4 last year, in a speech lasting less than an hour, John Howard referred more than 30 times to the "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. He offered authoritative detail: that Iraq's "arsenal of chemical and biological weapons (was) intact" and was a "massive program." All of this was false.

Ray McGovern, one of the CIA's most senior analysts and a personal friend of George Bush snr, told me: "It was 95 percent charade. And they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard."

The true danger is where a rampant superpower will strike next: watch out Korea, Syria, Iran, even China.

Set that truth against the present carnage in Iraq, and set it against the willful destruction that preceded it, which was barely reported in Australia.

The UN's two senior officials in Iraq in the 1990s, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both assistant secretaries-general of the UN, have described in detail a "genocidal embargo" imposed by America under a UN flag of convenience, aided and abetted by Australia.

"Almost a million Iraqis died as a direct result," Halliday told me, "including at least half a million children. The UNICEF studies are on the record. It was US policy to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, such as the water supply, which killed thousands of infants. By the time Bush invaded, a once prosperous country was a stricken nation."

In fact, UN records show that up to July 2002, more than $US5 billion worth of humanitarian aid, approved by then Security Council and paid for by Iraq, was blocked by the US.

How many Australians are aware of this and Australia's complicity? Howard sent RAN ships to police what in reality was a medieval-style siege. Who dared listen to Halliday and other distinguished witnesses that it was this terrible siege that reinforced Saddam's rule and prevented the Iraqi people from getting rid of him?

All this has been suppressed in Australia while the latest lies are channeled and amplified by journalists. I am not referring to the usual far-right windbags but those broadcasters who believe sincerely they are being objective; by constantly framing the national debate in the terms and clichés of mendacious power, they collude with it, censoring by omission.

Do they ever consider that the very notion of a "war on terror" is absurd when the power in Washington claiming to combat terror has run an empire of terror: Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and now Haiti, again? By comparison al-Qaeda is a lethal flea. The true danger is where a rampant superpower will strike next: watch out Korea Syria, Iran, even China.

As the prisoners begin to struggle home from the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, the scale of the crime is emerging. We now know that the British military command virtually refused to send troops to Iraq until Blair gave them a guarantee they would not be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. Blair's guarantee was worthless. And that frightens the British establishment, and the Australian establishment, too.

Unlike the US, Britain and Australia are signatories to the ICC. The times are changing; Washington-manipulated show trials of Third World dictators are giving way to the promise of universal justice, however tenuous it may seem.

The dock awaits those Westerners who bring terrorism to faraway countries, then watch it blow back in our faces. Like al-Qaeda, they should not be allowed to get away with it.

2. THE ASSASSINATION OF SHEIKH AHMED YASSIN

(Palestine is Also the Target)

MEMBERS OF THE A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION

The A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and Racism) Coalition shares the sentiment of the Palestinian people and the international community in condemning the assassination of the prominent Palestinian leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. This is a criminal action against not only a political leader, but also the entirety of the Palestinian people and their movement for self-determination and return. The attack was not just on one man or on one group, but was an attack against the Palestinian people, just as the Israel government has terrorized and killed thousands of Palestinians in an effort to destroy all resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

We regard this assassination as an indication that the Sharon government is preparing an all out assault on the Palestinian people, much in the same context as the attack on Lebanon in June 1982. At that time, Israel, with the full backing of the Reagan Administration, invaded Lebanon, occupied Beirut and heavily bombed Lebanese and Palestinian residential areas for months. The aim was to destroy the Palestinian national liberation movement and turn Lebanon into a virtual colony. Israel's occupation of Lebanese land was ended only in 2000.

Now, the Sharon government is attempting to create desperate conditions and issue what they hope will be a crushing blow to the Palestinian people. Before and following the murder of Sheikh Yassin, the Sharon government has announced that it intends to escalate the killing of Palestinian leaders. Given that these actions will create a firestorm of opposition in the region and within Palestine, it is inconceivable to consider that the Sharon Government could have undertaken this action unilaterally and without the approval of the Bush administration.

More than ever before, support for the Palestinian people and their right to return and self-determination is an imperative. It is our duty to raise our voices louder and to organize to call into question the complicity of the US government in this process.

We must redouble our effort to stop all forms of assistance to Israel, including military, economic, political, and diplomatic support. Israel receives $15 million every day from our taxes, and uses US-made weapons in its war on the Palestinian people. In return, Israel polices the Middle East on behalf of Corporate America. While millions are out of work and tens of millions have no health care, billions of dollars are sent every year to Israel to oppress the Arab people.

As the US continues its colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and as it robs the Haitian people of their liberty, the State of Israel continues its attempts to subjugate the Palestinian people by destroying their homes, expropriating their land, assassinating their leaders, and placing them within the confines of an Apartheid wall and in exile.

3. VOICES ON IRAQ: NOAM CHOMSKY INTERVIEWED

MATTHEW TEMPEST

There's a lot of focus on the American death toll but personally I think that's partly propaganda exaggeration. Polls have demonstrated time and time again that Americans are willing to accept a high death toll – although they don't like it, they're willing to accept it – if they think it's a just cause. There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication. And in this case too if they thought it was a just cause, the 500 or so deaths would be mourned, but not considered a dominant reason for not continuing. No, the problem is the justice of the cause.

Right after the war, by April, polls demonstrated pretty clearly that Americans thought the UN, not the US, ought to have prime responsibility for reconstruction, political and economic, in the post-war period. There's little support for the government's efforts to maintain what amounts to a powerful, permanent, military and diplomatic presence in Iraq.

In fact, it is little discussed, probably for that reason. Not very many people are aware of the fact that the US is planning to construct what will be the world's largest embassy in Iraq, with maybe 3,000 people. The military plans to maintain permanent bases and a substantial US military presence as long as they want it. The facts are reported, but marginally. Most people don't know about it. The orders to open the Iraqi economy up to foreign takeover are again known to people who pay close attention, but not to the general population.

The general population offers little support for the long-term effort to ensure that Iraq remains a client state with only nominal sovereignty and a base for other US actions in the region. Those commitments have only a very shallow popular support and that's more of a reason for the objections, the uneasiness about policy, than the number of casualties.

The trial of Saddam Hussein ought to be under some kind of international auspices that have some degree of credibility, so not something which is obviously victor's justice, which, no matter how much of a monster one is, doesn't carry credibility.

So first of all there's a matter of form, but also there's a matter of content. The trial should bring to the bar of justice his associates, those who gave decisive and substantial support for him right through his worst atrocities, long after the war with Iran. Again in 1991 when he crushed the rebellions viciously – the rebellions that might well have overthrown him. All of those people should be brought to justice. They're not all equally culpable but they were all critically involved – that includes European countries right through the 80s, including Russia and France, Germany and others, it includes, crucially, the United States and Britain all the way through, including 1991.

They should also bring to justice those who were responsible for the murderous sanction regime which surely led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and devastated the society so completely that they could not carry out what has happened elsewhere, where the US and Britain supported comparable monsters – namely, they were overthrown from within.

It seems not unlikely that the same might have happened in Iraq had the society not been devastated and had people not been compelled by the sanctions to rely on the tyrant for mere survival. Actually there's even more evidence of that coming out today as it's been revealed in the Kay investigation and others how fragile the hold on power was at the end.

So anyone who contributed to Saddam Hussein's atrocities to whatever degree they did, they're culpable as well and in some fashion an honest trial should deal with that.

On the US election:

Kerry is sometimes described as Bush-lite, which is not inaccurate, and in general the political spectrum is pretty narrow in the United States, and elections are mostly bought, as the population knows.

But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. And in this system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes.

My feeling is pretty much the way it was in the year 2000. I admire Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organizational function – that's important, and fine, and I support it.

However, when it comes to choice between the two factions of the business party, it does sometimes, in this case as in 2000, make a difference. A fraction.

That's not only true for international affairs, it's may be even more dramatically true domestically. The people around Bush are very deeply committed to dismantling the achievements of popular struggle through the past century. The prospect of a government which serves popular interests is being dismantled here. It's an administration that works, that is devoted, to a narrow sector of wealth and power, no matter what the cost to the general population. And could be extremely dangerous in the not very long run.

You could see it clearly in the way they dealt with, what is by common agreement, the major domestic economic problem coming along, namely the exploding health care costs. They're traceable to the fact that the US has a highly inefficient healthcare system – far higher expenditure than other comparable countries, and not particularly good outcomes. Rather poor, in fact. And it's because it's privatized.

So they passed a huge prescription drug bill, which is primarily a gift to the pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies. It's a huge taxpayer subsidy. They're already wealthy beyond dreams of avarice. And that's their constituency. And as that continues, with significant domestic problems ahead, for the general population it's extremely harmful.

Again there isn't a great difference, so for maybe 90% of the population over the past 20 years, real income has either stagnated or declined, while for the top few percent, it's just exploded astronomically. But there are differences and the present group in power is particularly cruel and savage in this respect.

4. ZAPATERO TO KERRY: BACK OFF, SENATOR, OUR TROOPS ARE COMING HOME

(More Than a Dime's Worth of Difference…in Spain)

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

At the precise moment Bush's Iraq coalition began to show signs of some fatal fissures, John Kerry strode forth to do the president's bidding for him.

After the newly-elected Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, announced his intentions to pull out Spanish troops from Iraq, Kerry, anxious to prove that he can manhandle world leaders into compliance with US imperial objections with more efficiency than Bush rushed in front of the cameras to demand that Zapatero reverse himself. Withdrawing Spanish troops now, Kerry chided, would send the wrong signal.

Wrong signal? And what signal is that? That there is more than a dime's worth of difference between Aznar and Zapatero on Iraq as opposed to the bloody harmony between Kerry and Bush? That politicians should keep their promises for at least a week?

Fortunately, Zapatero, who had previously said the he'd like to see Kerry elected president, was having none of it. He swiftly rebuked the senator's meddling. "My commitment is my commitment," Zapatero said. "Maybe John Kerry does not know—but I am happy to explain it to him—that my commitment to withdraw the troops goes back before the tragic, dramatic terrorist attack. If the UN does not take over the situation and there is not a rethinking of this chaotic occupation we are living through, in which there are more dead in the occupation than in the war phase, the Spanish troops are going to return to Spain."

Zapatero called the occupation of Iraq a fiasco that will lead only to more violence and hatred of the US-led forces. "There have been more deaths since the end of the war than during the invasion itself," Zapatero said. "Our allegiance will be for peace and against war. No more deaths for oil."

The feisty socialist also lashed out at the Bush administration's war on Afghanistan, which Kerry also backed without regret. "Fighting terrorism with bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles isn't the way to defeat it," he said. "Terrorism must be combated by a state of law. That's what I think Europe and the international community must debate."

Kerry could learn much from Zapatero's firm and sensible stand. But don't expect the senator to take any signals from abroad. The US presidential election is shaping up as a battle over manliness, a kind of political body building contest. Kerry wants to run as senator machismo. He doesn't want to pull out US forces. He want to top Bush by calling up 40,000 more troops and inserting more European forces to join in the bloodbath. No wonder Kerry has a hard time naming the European leaders that want him in the White House.

Watch the death count soar from now to November.

5. DON'T GET DUPED OUT OF YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY

HOLLY SKLAR

George W. Bush won't need Social security for retirement. He's a millionaire many times over.

Taxpayers will pad Bush's retirement with a large presidential pension. Former presidents receive $175,700 this year plus office, travel, medical and other benefits.

Social Security isn't broke, but millions of retirees who depend on it are, and many more would be broke without it.

The average retired worker's Social Security benefit is just $922 a month—about $11,000 a year. Disabled workers average just about $862.

One out of three seniors depends on Social Security for 90 to 100 percent of their income. Two out of three seniors depend on it for more than half their income. Even with Social Security, many seniors find themselves choosing between eating and heating, paying the mortgage or paying for medicine.

With Federal reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's help, the Bush administration would rob retirees to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Greenspan recently urged Congress to reduce Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age (now 65 to 67 depending on birth year) rather than roll back the tax cuts, which are the main cause of growing budget deficits. While Greenspan turned 78 on March 6, the life expectancy of white males born in 2000 is just 74.9 years. For black males, it's just 68.6 years. For all American men, life expectancy at birth was 61.6 years in 1940. 65.5 in 1950 and 66.8 in 1960.

Keep those life expectancies in mind when you hear calls to raise the retirement age to 70 or higher. And keep in mind the workers in physically debilitating jobs, the growing numbers of workers without health insurance or pensions, and high unemployment and underemployment rates in today's workforce.

Since 1983, the government has collected much more from Social Security taxes than it pays out in benefits in order to build up a surplus for the baby boom retirement.

Contrary to common belief, Social Security benefit payments will not begin to exceed Social Security tax revenue until at least 2018. Trustee projections show that the Social Security trust funds, now about $1.5 trillion, will keep Social Security fully financed until the year 2042—nearly four decades from now. That's using pessimistic economic assumptions. The Social Security outlook has improved over time as reality has beaten past projections.

Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes. The Social Security payroll tax takes a bigger share out of low- and middle-income paychecks than high-income ones because earnings above $87,900 are exempt.

The cost of the tax cuts enacted in 2001-2003 is nearly three times greater than Social Security's projected deficit for the next 75 years. That's according to unpublished new estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which also show that the cost of the tax cuts is larger than the combined projected deficits in Social security and Medicare.

It's obscene to consider cutting Social Security benefits while giving tax breaks to the rich. The average 2004 tax cut for the richest 1 percent--$59,292--is more than five times greater than the average retired workers' Social Security benefit.

Imagine that your town's wealthiest family throws a lavish party costing many times more than your annual income. You're not invited, but you get the bill. Worse, they plan to throw increasingly lavish parties every year and want you to short change your family, cash in your savings and postpone retirement to pay for them. You'd be outraged.

Between 2001 and 2010, tax cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans will cost $1.7 trillion, reports Citizens for Tax Justice. That's more than the Social Security trust fund assets.

Social Security is popular and politicians who want to kill it can't say it isn't. Instead, they manufacture a "crisis" and offer to fix it with cuts and privatization—a cash cow for Wall Street.

They want you so scared Social Security won't be there in the future, you'll let them make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don't get duped. Roll back tax cuts for the rich to reduce the budget deficits, not Social Security.

6. STUDENT COALITION LAUNCHES NATIONAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST SECRET UNIVERSITY INVESTMENTS

(New Website Discloses Controversial Investments Made by Leading Hedge Fund)

AUTHORSHIP UNKNOWN

As universities around the country increase their investments in secretive hedge funds, a national campus-based coalition has launched a disclosure campaign targeting Farallon Capital Management, one of the world's largest hedge funds and a major investor for academic institutions. Today the coalition unveiled a web site documenting Farallon's inner working and controversial investments, and published an open letter asking fund managers to open a dialogue with students over issues of social and environmental responsibility.

"Access to information and the opportunity to debate are core academic values," said Justin Ruben of the Graduate Employees and Students organization at Yale, a spokesperson for the campaign. "We've discovered that Farallon invests billions for my university and others, and some of those investments raise major ethical questions. We want to talk to Farallon directly about how they are using university money."

The new website, www.unfarallon.infor, investigates the environmental and social impacts of several recent investments, and identifies university and pension fund investors. It also contains hard-to-find information about Farallon's performance, fees, investment personnel, quarterly reports, and investment strategies, as well as the terms of one of its partnership agreements.

Students from 15 organizations on campuses that do business with Farallon sent a letter to the company's senior managing member, Tom Steyer, asking him to meet with a delegation to discuss greater disclosure. "Simply put, we do not want our universities to profit by harming other communities," the letter reads.

(The letter can be viewed at www.unfarallon.info/lettertosteyer.pdf) "At Yale, we happened to find out that Farallon was plowing endowment funds into an environmentally disastrous water-marketing scheme in Colorado, in spite of tremendous local opposition there. Is this an isolated case, or the tip of the iceberg? Without disclosure and dialogue, we have no way of knowing," said Andrea Johnson of the Sustainable Investment Group at Yale's Forestry School.

Signatories include students at Duke University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas and Yale University – schools with combined endowment assets worth approximately $40 billion. The students say the letter and the web site are only the beginning. "Traditional university investments like stocks have come under intense scrutiny in recent years as students discover the gap between what we learn in class about the environment or social justice, and the message that our universities send through their pursuit of maximum returns at any cost," said Naasiha Siddiqui, of Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations. "If they think they can escape controversy by turning to hedge funds, then students will have to shed light on the funds themselves."

"Concerned citizens today are more financially savvy than ever, understanding the need to hold secretive hedge funds like Farallon publicly accountable for the environmental and social impacts of their investments," say Ilyse Hogue, director of Rainforest Action Network's Global Finance Campaign. "Students have long been at the forefront for social change movements, and it's exciting to witness them taking Wall Street to task."

Farallon, which has over $8 billion in assets, runs five investment partnerships reserved for tax-exempt investors like universities and pension funds.

Universities have increasingly turned to hedge funds in the face of a bear market. According to the Boston Globe, " The nation's biggest foundations and university endowments have trimmed their traditional equity holdings and are relying more heavily on the portfolios that shoot for profits even in bad times: hedge funds."

The coalition targeting Farallon includes several national organizations that have successfully forced major investors and multinational corporations to address issues of social and environmental responsibility: Rainforest Action Network, Student Environmental Action Coalition, Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations and United Students Against Sweatshops.

7. GREG PALAST

INTERVIEWED BY

CYNTHIA MOOTHART

I understand you've got a few new projects.

We've got a DVD coming out, a one-hour special I did on the Bush Family on BBC that no American television station will touch. I have a CD, "Weapons of Mass Instruction," out because I can't get the story out on American radio except for the oasis like "Democracy Now!" and finally, we will soon have the new edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, with the new chapter on how they will steal the 2004 election.

How will they steal the election?

There is something called the Help America Vote Act that our president signed a year and a half ago. As soon as the Bush family tells us they're going to help us vote I get very nervous. And sure enough, it is filled with expanding the purge of voters they did in Florida. Instead of eliminating that horror show, that racial voter program, they're going to take it on the road nationwide. The second thing they're going to do is provide billions of dollars to force states to computerize voting. I have some other angles that no one else has picked up yet. It's a creepy story, and hopefully you'll get fightin' mad. They did a test run when Katherine Harris put computer touch screens in Broward county in Florida. In the black precincts the computers went down, and thousands and thousands of black votes were never counted in machines ordered by Katherine Harris, made by an evil little company iVotronics ES&S. That was a test run not to see that they worked but to see that they didn't work at the right place. And of course Jeb Bush solved the disaster they had in Broward county by firing the black woman who is the elections official. So they did their test run and now they're going to take it on the road. And what you're going to see is a massive non-count of black votes. Here's the bottom line: In 2000, I'm working with Chris Edley of Harvard Law School on this—using his statistics and numbers and he was a US Civil Rights Commissioner—to determine that 1 million black people cast votes nationwide and didn't have their votes counted. So the non-count of the black vote is a serious racial problem.

How did you arrive at a million votes?

Actually, it's the US Civil Rights commission. It's quite official if anyone bothers to look. The US Civil Rights Commission and Harvard University Center for Civil Rights. We know 2.9 million votes, we know the exact number of votes that were cast and not counted in 2000 that's reported precinct by precinct across America. So we have the exact number of not counted. But if you look at the precincts—black majority precincts have huge a number of non-counts. You see that one in five votes will not be counted, whereas in the white counties one in 60, one in 70 won't get counted for some technical reason. Doing a simple regression analysis it's figured one in seven black votes is not counted in the US. And that's about 10 times the rate of non-counts for white voters. If you proportion that against the actual numbers of non-counts, it comes out to one million-seven thousand votes cast not counted in 2000. Broward county was the testing zone. It's the non-counts they're aiming at. People are over-focused on the ability to hack into the machine and change votes from Democratic to Republican. The biggest danger is the strategic breakdown of machines that will cause the non-vote in strategic precincts. That's what happened in Broward, where the machines were first tested. That's what will happen nationwide. Watch.

People say why vote or whatever, we can't win. That's not true. We've had some very successful movements in the United States, from the women's movement, the union movement, the populist movement, the consumer movement. There's only so much crap Americans will eat; Americans are not good at eating shit for too long. At a certain point, they're only so many aircraft carriers the Grinning Chimp can land on before people get tired of the duck and cover security game they're playing. Because of George Bush America is unsafe today. That's the damn truth. And that's one of the stories I'll be making clear as well.

8. GLOBAL WARMING SPIRALS UPWARDS

GEOFFREY LEAN

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control.

Measurements by US government scientists show that concentrations of the gas, the main cause of the climate exchange, rose by a record amount over the past 12 months. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply, marking an unprecedented triennial surge.

Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear that it could show the first signs that global warming is feeding on itself, with rising temperatures causing increases in carbon dioxide, which then go on to drive the thermometer even higher. That would be a deeply alarming development, suggesting that this self-reinforcing heating could spiral upwards beyond the reach of any attempts to combat it.

The development comes as official figures show that Britain's emissions of the gas soared by three per cent last year, twice as fast as the year before. The increase – caused by rising energy use and by burning less gas and more coal in power stations – jeopardizes the Government's target of reducing emissions by 19 per cent by 2010.

It also coincides with a new bid to break the log jam over the Kyoto treaty headed by Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who remains close to Tony Blair.

Mr. Byers is co-chairing with US Republican Senator Olympia Snowe a new taskforce, run by the Institute of Public Policy Research and US and Australian think tanks, which is charged with devising proposals that could resolve the stalemate caused by George Bush's hostility to the treaty.

The carbon dioxide measurements have been taken from the 11,400 ft summit of Hawaii's Mauna Loa, whose enormous dome makes it the most substantial mountain on earth, by scientists working for the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They have been taking the readings from the peak – effectively breathalysing the planet – for the past 46 years. It is an ideal site for the exercise, 2,000 miles form the nearest land and protected by freak climatic conditions from pollution from Hawaii, more than two miles below.

The latest measurements, taken March 21^st, 2004, showed that carbon dioxide had reached about 379 parts per million (ppm), up from abut 376 ppm the year before, from 373 ppm in 2002 and about 371 ppm in 2001. These represent three of the four biggest increases on record ( the other was in 1998), creating an unprecedented sequence. They add up to a 64 per cent rise over the average rate of growth over the past decade, of 1.8 ppm a year.

The US scientists have yet to analyze the figures and stress that they could be just a remarkable blip. Professor Ralph Keeling – whose father Charles Keeling first set up the measurements from Mauna Load – said: "We are moving into a warmer world".

9. REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS, HAND IN HAND, TO SAVE THE BILLIONAIRE BOY'S CLUB

GREG PALAST

A thoughtful reader found my Texas tales about President Bush a wee harsh:

"G'day, asshole! Smelled any good ones lately? That's generally where guys like yu have their noses. By the way, it's PRESIDENT Bush to you, numbnuts. Now, have a g'day and may Ireland be free!"

So I resolved to be a bit fairer—and take a look at the strange financial history of the Arkansas Hillary-Billies. I thought it proper to check Special Prosecutor Ken Starr's evidence. He had nothing. Starr, whose mind is as small as it is vicious, spent $40 million investigating the Clintons and turned up little more than a bucket of dirty "Whitewater," a stained dress and some overwritten soft porn ("So then I pulled down the President's…"). How could they find nothing? Part of the problem was that Starr and staff were no Sam Spades, just a bunch of right-wing preppy snots from white-shoe law firms who thought they could replace investigative know-ho with unlimited meanness.

But if Starr was lost in a nutty cavort with Clinton's slick willy, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was looking into the serious stuff; six-figure payments to Hillary's former law partners by the Riady family of Indonesia and Entergy International of Little Rock, Arkansas, Hillary's former client. Then in 1998, just as the Republicans on the Senate committee were closing in on the evidence that could, if borne out, pull down the Clintons…the committee closed its investigation.

Why? The answer is: Triad.

Clinton was saved from the truly threatening inquiry about his Indonesian money, an impeachable offense, by two of America's wealthiest oil and gas barons, Charles and David Koch. They had not set out to rescue Clinton. The Koch brothers despise Clinton with a passion.

Koch Industries is the biggest company you've never heard of—and their owners like it that way. Estimates of its annual turnover, at $35 billion a year, make it bigger than Microsoft or Boeing Aircraft. We can only estimate because Koch is a private corporation, the second largest in the United States. David and Charles Koch, who own nearly all of it, are reported to have a combined net worth of $4 billion. If you've never heard of the Kochs, the politicians have. Among the Big Oil that funded the Republican party during George W. Bush's run for the White House, Koch Industries pumped in more than any corporation except Enron and Exxon-Mobil.

The Koch clan's fortune originated in Russia, where daddy Fred Koch built oil refineries for Stalin's regime. In 1946, Koch returned from the Soviet Union to Wichita, Kansas, and founded the ultra-right John Birch Society. David and Charles have rejected their father's politics, preferring to back ultra-ultra right-wing causes. In 1980, as a Libertarian Party candidate, David campaigned against Ronald Reagan.

Secrecy is the Kochs' trademark. From headquarters in Wichita, they operate the nation's only private, secure telephone network outside the CIA to control their core business as America's largest purchaser of oil and gas from small farmers and Indian reservations.

As owners of a private company, the Kochs answer to no one about their expenditures. No little old ladies query them at stockholder meetings. Unconstrained, the Koch brothers can indulge their singular dreams. Where other US corporations throw a few million dollars into the political arena in the hopes of obtaining a few special favors, the Kochs have spent close to $100 million to change the entire tone of political discourse in America.

And they succeeded. With $21 million spent to establish the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, $30 million to start the Citizens for a Sound Economy and tens of millions more for think tanks, political action committees and the like, they constructed a nonpareil policy apparatus that reinvigorated the antigovernment movement with a new intellectual legitimacy backed by fearsome political clout. From Cato and the Koch machine came Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America" and the funds to put Gingrich in power in the 1994 elections.

Not that the Kochs don't call in special favors. In 1989, the US Senate Special Committee on Investigations concluded that "Koch Oil, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, is the most dramatic example of an oil company stealing by deliberate mismeasurement and fraudulent reporting." FBI agents had watched Koch Industries truckers appearing to take, but not fully paying for, oil from small gathering tanks on Indian reservations. An expert for Indian tribes calculates that $1.5 billion of Koch Industries' wealth comes from pilfered oil. Koch denies it.

Action against Koch for stealing from the Indians stalled until 1995 when an FBI agent on the Senate investigation, Richard Elroy, charged in a letter to the Justice Department that criminal prosecution had been declined "for political reasons" during the first Bush presidency. So Clinton's Justice Department followed up on the FBI's evidence, concentrating on the environmental crimes and filed civil lawsuits charging Koch Industries with 315 willful acts of pollution. Clinton also impaneled two grand juries to consider criminal indictments.

Newt Gingrich raced to the Kochs' rescue. If one clause of Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America," the Regulatory Reform Act, had become law, the Justice Department case against the Kochs—which sought big money and portended jail time—would have been doomed. Proposed changes in law included eliminating some environmental controls and decriminalizing violations.

Passage of the Koch-saving legislation depended upon Republicans holding their majority in Congress. In the 1996 election cycle, Republican control was in jeopardy, Crucial to their ultimate narrow victory in that campaign was a multimillion-dollar television advertising blitz in key districts paid for by the Coalition for Our Children's Future, a registered charity. The action was extraordinary for a child protection society—as was their choice of candidates to assist. Only weeks before CCF purchased the adverts, every one of the incumbent congressmen they helped, all Republicans, voted to abolish food stamps for children of the poor.

The politicians supported by the "Children's" Fund had something in common besides an antipathy to free meals for youngsters. Their districts contained Koch operations.

It may surprise you to learn that US law prohibits corporate payment in aid of political campaigns. Officially, donations must come through individuals or political action committees.

Investigators with the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee located bank records linking the children's "charity" and other political front groups to Triad Management, an operation funded by the Kochs. Democratic senators threatened to subpoena Koch Industries' chiefs to question whether they funded Triad and manipulated its related groups. Democrats could drag the tycoons before the same public tribunal on campaign finances skewering Clinton.

A key Senate insider, who must remain anonymous, says Republicans then offered a straightforward trade: "A truce—you don't do Triad, we don't do Clinton." Other sources inside the committee confirm that the Republicans, under the direction of Senators Trent Lott and Don Nickles, rather than risk exposure of the Kochs' web of mega-dollar funding operations, agreed to shut down the money probe and let Clinton off the hook.

The true, unreported reason for the collapse of the inquiry most threatening to Clinton—the Indonesia money chain, which could have knocked him out of office—reveals the ultimate measure of Koch influence: that Republicans sacrificed their case against the President to keep their secret benefactors under wraps.

What Every Billionaire Wants

I discovered the billionaire-donor deal not because I was on some kind of hunt for the goods on Clinton or on New Gingrich, but because, in my old day job as an investigator and government adviser, I had been tracking the Koch brothers, the Riadys and their partner, Entergy International of Little Rock. That Entergy and Koch, both master deal makers, popped up in the middle of a Senate inquiry that suddenly stopped dead gave off the smell of a bit too much bipartisan cooperation.

The Kochs, by the way, are a real piece of work. These are the owners of the company the FBI agent says skimmed oil out of the gathering tanks of poor Indians in Oklahoma. In 1999, Koch Industries paid $25 million to settle claims after a civil jury found the company liable for underpayments. Maybe the top guys at Koch Industries, the billionaire brothers themselves, didn't know about the skimming game; maybe there was a good explanation. But not according to Roger Williams, former executive in their oil-gathering operation.

Williams kept records of the filching—a couple of dollars' worth of oil here, a couple there—hardly the kind of petty cash that billionaires would seem to bother with. But Williams (on tape I've obtained) was asked how Charles Koch reacted to a paper that "showed how much 'overage' they had and how many dollars." Of billionaire Koch and another executive with him at the time, Williams said: "They would just giggle and nudge each other, you know it's kind of a fun time."

Williams, who did not know he was being recorded, could have repeated Koch's words wrongly, or heard Koch wrong. But what Williams reportedly heard was a phrase that explains the success of some of America's wealthiest corporate chiefs. Williams was surprised at the billionaire's concern over these small-change scams, but Williams said Charles Koch told him, "I want my fair share and that's all of it."

(Editor's Note: I highly recommend the book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast)