Hard on the heels of his last idiotic column, David Brooks would seem to be intent on lowering the pundit bar to the level of questions like 'Who's buried in Grant's tomb?' His latest effort takes on the thorny issue of SocSec reform by concluding that a) it's about the stock market (no shit, Sherlock) and b) that Democrats are hysterical anti-corporate whiners in a conspiracy to defraud the nation of its rightful place at Wall Street's table.

Harry Reid has begun his tenure as Senate minority leader by doing his best imitation of Huey Long: "They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong!"

What you hear these days is not liberalism. It's conspiracyism. It's the belief that the Bushite corporate cabal is going to do to domestic programs what the Bushite neocon cabal did in the realm of foreign affairs. It's the belief in malevolent and shadowy forces that will grab everything for their own greedy ends. This is Michael Moore-ism applied to domestic affairs, and it will leave the Democrats only deeper in the hole.

I don't deny that many business and Wall Street types would like to capture the system for their own benefit.

Big of you, Dave, especially considering that you live in NY, the state where AG Eliot Spitzer has had to work 20 hrs a day just to contain the rampant theft by pigs eager to empty the trough now that the farmer's back is turned.

Republicans today place corporate interests ahead of consumer interests. When regulators, such as those in my office, try to call them on their cronyism, they portray our efforts as bureaucratic meddling in free markets. But we did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping off small investors. We sought to right the wrong, reestablishing the level playing field that is a prerequisite to market competition and ensuring that every investor enjoys the same opportunity to profit that the insiders have.

Similarly, we did not ask the courts to stop predatory mortgage lending because we begrudge lenders an appropriate rate of return. We did so because what was happening to borrowers was illegal and wrong and needed to be stopped so that people could, in fact, have a true ownership stake in society. We didn't investigate mutual-fund companies because of a desire to increase government regulation. We did it to stop a scam that allowed a favored few insiders to benefit at the expense of all other investors.

The Bush administration, in the name of free markets, has allowed business to take advantage of the small investor, victimizing those who want to own a piece of the U.S. economy. The scandals involving Wall Street analysts, banking, and mutual funds all demonstrated the Republicans' failure to protect those Americans who want to play their part in the Ownership Society.

But don't let that sort of thing deter you, Dave. Really, the growing hatred of Wall Street on Main Street is totally out of whack because, as DaBrooks explains simply enough so even he can understand it, 'corruption is the price we pay for economic freedom, and the benefits of that freedom vastly outweigh the costs.'

I shit you not, people. He actually wrote that sentence. Hit the link and see for yourself if you don't believe me. Corruption? Thievery? Eh. NBFD. Get used to it. It's the price of doing business in a free society.

DaBrooks must be a graduate of the Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney School of Ethics. What? They're looting the Baghdad Museum of priceless antiquities while our troops are stationed down the street protecting worthless banker-paper at the Oil Ministry? Tough. Shit happens. That's the price we pay for freedom. Our troops are rooting around in the garbage for armor to put on their vehicles? Too bad. Deal with it. It's the price we pay for freedom. Every time they fuck up or get caught stealing us blind, it's really all good because It's The Price We Pay For Freedom.

Dave Dave Dave. I know you get these directives from the RNC and you're a puppet and you have to say what they tell you to say, but do you have to pick the dumbest and least defensible talking points to support every time? Could you pretend, just once, that your readers are over 12? Or is that beyond you?

If Grover Norquist is a toad--and he is--DaBrooks is the wart on his ass.

Next Time: Can Dave sink any lower?

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about the role and relevancy of the Electoral College, that odd invention, unique to America. Why bother, one wonders? What's it good for? It's a rubber stamp, a formality. Technically there is no president until the EC meets and votes but that hasn't stopped Bush--or any other president-elect--from acting as if it's a done deal.

And why not? The parties control the electors and have since they were formed early in the 19th century. The electors do as they're told, a system that resulted in the first known case of presidential election-theft (by Republicans, naturally) in the infamous Hayes/Tilden campaign of 1876. Why should anyone take the EC seriously?

The Constitution, that's why.

Article II, which established the EC, says nothing about the electors having to follow the popular will, the party's will, or anybody else's but their own. They cast their votes in secret and they can vote for whoever. The decision is entirely theirs, and so is the responsibility. They are America's electoral jury--the law may guide them but in the end they can do whatever they want to do.

Now, one of the arguments advanced to justify the EC came from the conservative Hamiltonian wing who were nervous about popular elections. They thought that allowing the hoi-polloi to vote for their representatives was quite enough of a risk to take with the governance of a new country under a new system that hadn't been tried since the fall of Ancient Greece. Letting them vote for president was, they thought, tantamount to granting liberty to chaos. The EC, populated, they figured, by men of rank, breeding, and power in the community, would act as a check on what they feared most: the rise of a charismatic populist figure--a demogogue--who would lead the masses in a revolt against the men of rank, breeding and power in the community.

Parenthetically, it has always been hard for people who worship money to believe that there are people who don't. They are absolutely convinced that, deep in our hearts, we have the same greedy dreams they have and--given half a chance--would be just as unscrupulous as they have been to achieve them. The Hamiltonians, all of whom were heavily schooled in Roman history, had the lesson of the Gracchi before them, the populist uprising that terrified the Roman plutocrats even more than the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. All the slaves wanted was freedom, but the Gracchi wanted land distribution. The plutocrats then--just as do the ones currently surrounding Emperor Jr--thought that though the slaves might murder them in their beds, the Gracchis would steal their money which was much worse. Servants of Moloch throughout history have maintained, in the teeth of all available evidence, their steadfast conviction that everybody is as greedy and ruthless as they are; that beliefs of honor, spirituality, generosity, tolerance, equality and brotherhood only go as deep as the first available drachma.

But though their belief was based on their hysterical fear of an unlikely eventuality, still, they had a point. Psychology--and the history of the last century--have demonstrated pretty conclusively that, as Goering said, the masses can be easily led to the most outrageous excesses, much more easily than individuals can be led there. To some extent, the idea that a body should exist for the express purpose of putting the brakes on when the masses are being led over a cliff is a good one.

Since there is no other possible excuse for their existence these days, one is entitled to demand that they live up to the one duty they have left: to protect us from ourselves.

I therefore call upon the EC to do its Constitutional duty and reject, in the name of The People, the election of the worst president in US history. The Kool Aid Drinkers and Bush Cultists will hate you but your grandchildren will honor your name for centuries.

What d'ya say? Do it for posterity. Do it because it's the right thing to do and you know it. Do it just because you can. But do it.

You're our last hope.

What's this? The Bush Admin backing off its most cherished (supposedly) Middle East initiative?Junior patently NOT 'staying the course'? The Great Leader of Democracy abandoning his most compelling reason for starting the Second Gulf War? That can't be!

But it is.

Tamara Wittes and Sarah Yerkes of The Brookings Institute's Saban Center for Middle East Policy take a look at his Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and come away underwhelmed.

Nearly two years old, MEPI has already spent over $103 million on behalf of educational, economic, and political reform and women's empowerment in the Middle East.

MEPI was meant as an antidote to America's traditional focus on government-to-government, large-scale aid programs, and a recognition by the U.S. government that effective reform in economies and society had to be accompanied by increased political freedoms. Instead of large projects, MEPI was designed to provide smaller grants to build partnerships with non-governmental Arab groups and local citizens, and to build links across Middle Eastern countries. Inherent in this approach was a judgment that Arab governments had not sufficiently recognized their looming demographic and economic challenges, and had not fully embraced the need for political, economic, and social reform. Instead, the thinking went, they would need to be goaded toward change by a combination of independent American assistance and grassroots activism.

After close to two years of operation, how well is this new democracy-promotion tool meeting its aims? A review of MEPI's spending, programs, and priorities reveals three troubling flaws: a scatter-shot approach to promoting reform; an overemphasis on government-directed assistance that repeats instead of repairs the errors of our past assistance in the region; and, most worrying, a lack of support at higher policy levels for its goals and projects. MEPI's problems in fact reveal the deep ambivalence with which the president's forward strategy of freedom is being implemented. As such, its record raises troubling prospects for democracy promotion as an aim of American policy in the Middle East.

Any of that sound just the tiniest bit familiar? I mean, haven't we heard practically the exact same charge leveled at every initiative this Admin has attempted that didn't involve a deliberate sale of govt resources and prerogatives to a corporation? The only thing these bozos seem to be good at is corruption. Anything else they take on, they don't even seem to know how to start.

MEPI's first main flaw is the evident lack of a coherent strategy, which hampers the program's ability to have a noticeable impact on deeply entrenched social problems and reluctant target governments. In its first nineteen months of operation, MEPI spent its largest share of funds on political reform projects (33 percent or $34,015,000), and the smallest share on women's empowerment projects (16 percent or $16,981,904). Education reform and economic reform received 25 and 24 percent of MEPI's funding (or $25,900,000 and $24,626,280), respectively. In principle, this allocation, with political reform most prominent, reflects the president's stated priorities for Middle Eastern reform. But in practice, the programs funded by MEPI present a scatter-shot approach to reform that does not take account of the political hurdles to economic and social reform and that splits an already-small funding pie into miniscule fragments.

MEPI's first-year programs run the gamut from the mundane to the visionary. Economic reform grants include funds to translate Algeria's documentary submissions to the World Trade Organization ($963,000), link Tunisian and American companies for investment ($100,000), train entrepreneurs ($786,575), and boost intraregional trade ($600,000). Education programs include "English in a Box" teaching resources for Jordanian and Moroccan teachers ($400,000), internet links between Yemeni and American high schools ($1.5 million) and a "child centered education program" for selected states in North Africa and the Gulf ($1.1 million). Women's empowerment programs include projects to teach women to read and advocacy programs to combat honor killings. While these projects individually present worthy opportunities to improve the lives of Arab men, women, and children, the sheer diversity of audiences and issues addressed by these programs means that their impact is likely to be limited in both scope and longevity.

That might qualify as the understatement of the week, if not the year, but the authors are missing the connection between all those programs--they may, indeed, be scattershot but there's a unifying thread betraying a two-pronged approach to a single goal. The two strands of that thread are signaled by the program to 'link Tunisian and American companies for investment' and the 'English in a Box' program.

Strand One: Making the Middle East Safe for Democracy American Corporations

From the minute that Gardener was replaced as Viceroy because he wasn't friendly enough to American business and didn't seem to understand that his job was to make sure US corporations got all the inflated contracts and a free hand to implement them any way--and at any price--they chose without interference or oversight by the likes of him, it has been perfectly clear that the Admin's only real interest in Iraq lies in its potential as a bonanza for American business. But even before that, the signs were there. Troops being sent to guard the Oil Ministry while the Iraq Museum down the street was being looted due to the lack of protection showed pretty clearly where the BA's priorities were. Safeguarding the oil fields makes sense, but the Ministry? That's the depository for contracts and project details. Paper. And paper that would be of no interest or value to anyone not seeking to track and control the production and sale of Iraqi oil.

The aim of MEPI's first arm is just as clearly to promote the insertion of American corporations into the Middle East's economic infrastructure and facilitate the making of contacts if not laws that will give them an important leg up in a region that has been a notoriously hard nut for American companies to crack. Even relatively friendly govts like Egypt's have been reluctant to cede control of their native industries and resources to US firms eager to buy in. The BA is aiming to change all that.

Strand Two: Indoctrinating the Locals to an Understanding of Their New Status as American Puppets Client States Partners

Note that for all the talk of supporting the local economy and encouraging local democracy, MEPI programs like 'English in a Box' aren't aimed at facilitating a native version of what that might mean but at grooming a population more in tune with our demands and better able to communicate not with each other but with the US, especially with the US corporations that will soon be doing business with them--at the point of a gun if necessary.

Again, from the beginning of the BA's propaganda effort in the Middle East, the theme has been centered on their acceptance of us rather than the focus being on our working with them. If it were not, the money would be flowing to local community and political groups who emphasize democratic reforms. Instead, it's going to govts that aren't always friendly to such efforts.

One of MEPI's distinguishing features at its founding was its determination to reject large, government-to-government aid programs in favor of direct assistance to Arab civil society groups. But despite MEPI's intention to encourage the growth and activity of the Arab civic sector, the vast majority, over 70 percent, of MEPI's first $103 million in grants was distributed to programs that either directly benefited Arab government agencies (in activities ranging from translating documents to computerizing schools) or provided training programs and seminars for Arab government officials (including ministry bureaucrats, parliamentarians, and judges). Only eighteen percent of the allocated funds supported either American or Arab non-governmental organizations working in the region, and five percent went to build the Arab private sector and promote U.S.-Arab business ties. 5.7 percent of the funds were spent on exchange programs, with the only other beneficiary, the U.S. government, receiving just under one half of one percent.

---

But the governments' reform strategies do not fully accord with America's goals. Most Arab leaders recognize that their stagnant social environments and state-dominated economies cannot meet the expectations of their young and increasingly restless populations. Yet most also seek to reform in ways that improve governmental and economic performance without changing the distribution of political power. While a few forward-leaning regimes have placed limited power in the hands of their peoples through constitutional and electoral reforms, many others are trying to create just enough sense of forward motion and participation without power to alleviate the building public pressure for change at the top. When a government demonstrates a real commitment to improving its responsiveness to citizen needs and its openness to citizen participation, it can be both appropriate and helpful for MEPI to provide government-to-government support. But where this will is absent, weak or feigned, MEPI's funding can have the effect of subsidizing an Arab government's attempts to build a kinder, gentler autocracy.

In principle, MEPI was supposed to avoid this trap by finding nascent liberal politicians within civil society, giving them funding and training, and helping them grow their followings so as to secure velvet revolutions. In fact, very little MEPI funding is actually directed to this goal. Of the projects we reviewed, only 10 representing a mere $5.4 million of MEPI's money, were directed to help local NGOs expand their work in areas such as family law and anti-corruption campaigns. In the key area of political reform, MEPI tends to fund programs carried out by American NGOs that do not cross the red lines of regime-sponsored reform, or that simply do not match the political realities Arabs face. MEPI's political reform program has trained Morocco's newly elected members of parliament, whose legislative authority pales in comparison with that of the reigning monarch, in "the functioning of parliament and roles and responsibilities in the legislative process," to the tune of $600,000. MEPI also conducted a "Gulf Regional Campaign School" to train women political candidates from Gulf countries—but only two Gulf states allow women to run for office at all.

By devoting such a large percentage of its funding to programs benefiting Arab officialdom, MEPI is effectively choosing to support the regimes' chosen strategy of "controlled liberalization."

The suggestion of the authors is that this is misdirected action. It isn't. It's clearly directed and the direction has to do with implanting the notion that the US govt is the Arab govt's 'partner' in their governing--an astonishing reversal of the heretofore intractable notion of national sovreignty. When we gave such money to govts in the past, it was because they were in dire straits economically and often because they were in the midst of a crisis. The Arab govts we're helping to fund are neither, and the injection of the US directly into their governing process is the precursor to their acceptance of us as an important player in their respective countries.

In his new book, Intelligence Matters, former Sen Bob Graham, who spent 10 years in the Sernate Intelligence Committee and is one of the most honest national pols we've got left after elections in which slightly more than half the population voted their hysteria, has some startling things to say about both 9/11 and the wars it led to. In a MoJo interview, Sen Graham talks about some of what's in his book. There was one section that caught my attention because it was a conversation in which we see a very different Tommy Franks from the Bush cheerleader on tv. Here's the passage:

MJ.com: How cooperative were President Bush and his administration with your inquiry?

BG: They started out with a lot of representations of how helpful they would be, in the same way that they did to the citizens’ 9/11 Commission that followed us. But when you actually started to dig close to sensitive information -- the most sensitive being the role of the Saudis -- they began to erect barriers.

MJ.com: When did you first realize that the administration was shifting its focus away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and toward Iraq instead?

BG: In February 2002. The U.S. Central Command, which has military responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia, is based in Tampa, Fla. I’ve had a practice of going there during military operations to get a briefing. On that particular day, the subject was the war in Afghanistan. At the conclusion of a fairly upbeat briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks -- who was the commander of Central Command and subsequently the commander of the war in Iraq -- took me into his office and said, “We’re no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan; we’re engaged in a manhunt.” He went on to say that some of the military personnel and equipment which had been most important in the early successes in Afghanistan were being relocated to get ready for a war in Iraq. He then went on to describe how he thought the war on terrorism should be conducted: staying in Afghanistan until we crushed Al Qaeda there, then moving to other areas, such as Somalia and Kenya, where there were large numbers of Al Qaeda cells. He was also suspicious of the intelligence that was coming out of Iraq, and said that the Europeans knew more about weapons of mass destruction there than we did. That was my first recognition that we were about to abandon the war on terror against the enemy that had just killed 3,000 Americans, in order to shift our attention to a bad, evil person -- but a bad, evil person who had never killed any Americans other than in combat.
(emphasis added)

That isn't what he was saying publicly, of course.

I'm not a big Tommy Franks fan but I never got on him like some in the 'sphere because I was pretty sure he wasn't the one calling the shots. Rummy was working this one from his office. It brought back memories of civilian interference in Nam and the debacle that resulted from McNamara trying to make day-to-day decisions on the running of a war that was 6000 miles away. I'm glad he used civilian control to stop Westmoreland from using nukes, but apart from that, civilian control was a unmitigated disaster.

Kind of makes you wish Rummy had been listening to Franks instead of Laurie Mylroie, don't it?

Duncan Hunter got the Pentagon what they told him they wanted: a toothless intelligence 'reform' that leaves almost all of their perogatives--budget control, operations control, strategic control--intact. As signed, the bill no longer defines either the new intel czar's role or duties, significantly muddying the already turgid swamp of competing agencies' turf wars.

WASHINGTON - While opinions are divided over whether the revamp of the US intelligence community laid out in the compromise bill just approved by Congress will improve the performance of the relevant agencies, there is little doubt that the failure of President George W Bush to push the bill through would have badly damaged his political credibility.

In the end, Bush was forced to pressure recalcitrant members of his own Republican Party - and his own top Pentagon officials - who opposed the reorganization out of fear that the Defense Department might have to give up some of its control over the sprawling US intelligence apparatus to go along with the reform.

But to rally support, Bush also weakened some of the most important innovations in the original bill, notably the authority of the new director of national intelligence (DNI) to control the allocation of the community's estimated US$40 billion budget among its 16 agencies.

"Substantively, the intelligence bill's main importance is that it serves as an illustration that the United States government did something in response to the 9-11 Commission report," said John Prados, an independent expert on the national security bureaucracy, referring to last summer's report by the bipartisan group mandated by Congress to examine why US agencies failed to prevent al-Qaeda's devastating September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

"The form and content of the commission's idea for the DNI post were considerably watered down, and, in the final form, the position's authority remains very much undefined," he noted. "Ultimately, the problem is that the commission's recommendations have not really been acted upon."

Which was, after all, the whole point. Nobody really wanted to change anything. What they wanted was the appearance of change, and in the end that may be a good thing. The intel bill was, so far as I am concerned, fatally flawed as proposed. It granted so much power to the czar it put smack dab in the middle of the WH infrastructure that politicization of all the intel services was a foregone conclusion. Junior would have been able to put Feith and Libby in charge of the whole apparatus, assuring more of the 'conclusions first, facts later' mindset of the Bush Admin that led to Iraq without the dissenting voices that eventually made their way to the surface after the invasion.

That doesn't guarantee dissent, of course, but at least it leaves open the opportunity for it, and that's better than nothing. Now the intel bill, rather than being actively hostile to politically incorrect information, amounts to little more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sad when that's the best result you could hope for.

Offered for balance: Parents Rebel:

ENTERPRISE, Fla. — The dishes, garbage and dirty laundry would pile up for days when Cat and Harlan Barnard's teenage children refused to do their chores. So the Barnards went on strike, moving out of their house and into a domed tent set up in their front driveway. The parents refuse to cook, clean or drive for their children — Benjamin, 17, and Kit, 12 — until they shape up.

"We've tried reverse psychology, upside down psychology, spiral psychology and nothing has motivated them for any length of time," said Cat Barnard, 45, as she sat in a lawn chair at an umbrella-covered table.

Cat Barnard/in the front yard

The strike took Benjamin and Kit by surprise. They came home from school Monday to find their mother outside with handwritten signs that read "Parents on Strike" and "Seeking Cooperation and Respect!"

Cat Barnard, a stay-at-home mom, and her 56-year-old husband, a government social services worker, decided their children needed to learn about empathy and responsibility.

The Barnards unsuccessfully tried smiley-face charts and withholding allowances to get their children to do chores. They even sought help from a psychologist.

The tipping point may have been when Benjamin didn't offer to help his sweating, struggling mother work on the lawn Sunday, even though she should have been recovering from oral surgery.

"I had absolutely no motherly guilt after that," Cat Bernard said.

The Barnards have slept on air mattresses in the tent and have barbecued while their children fended for themselves with frozen TV dinners. The parents only go inside to shower and use the bathroom.

Boil em in oil, Mr Brooks?

Carlos Guerra, political columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, once said that he liked writing columns because he could write about anything or nothing, even the weather. But I read him all the time and even his 'even the weather' columns are about something--its effect on Texas agriculture for instance. David Brooks, on the other hand, seems to be making a specialty of writing columns that are literally about nothing. Here, for example.

Somewhere or other, Mr 'I Write Minutiae If It's Friendly to the Right' Brooks read that the birth rate is Up in 'Red States' and Down in Blue States. He uses that tiny, evanescent fact to justify a column that gushes like an oil well in a soap opera, anointing this statistical anomaly as a 'movement' he has the gall to call 'natalism'.

Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

Doggone it, those Red Staters are just so darn saintly and self-sacrificing compared to us selfish, self-involved, self-loathing Blue Staters, ain't they? Why, they live for their kids; we, of course, send ours careening down garbage chutes and living in dumpsters so we can buy a better class of brie and a tonier wine.

In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children.
(emphasis added)

And naturally, 'disorder, vulgarity and danger' are to be found in the Evil Cities of the Coasts where Blue Staters--those bastards--insist on living right next door to Satanic elements. Like furriners and wogs and wrong-skin-color people of all hues who actually rub elbows and--do you believe it?--DON'T THINK ANYTHING'S WRONG WITH THAT! Where they have the ungodly arrogance to think women should have the right to control their own bodies and that maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the state to kill people as a way of proving that killing is a bad thing. Oh, the Horror! The Humanity!

If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences.

Oh, Lord, save us from Generosity, Tolerance, and a Satanic refusal to get all bug-eyed and outraged and frightened by the semi-public exposure of those areas of the human skin which we deem Lewd and Perverted and otherwise Not Nice, and which we have decided in our Infinite Fear are Omens of the Destruction of Civilization! Spare Us, O Lord, from the Violence of Nudity--in the Name of The Children! Let us live in all-white clean exurbs where our kids have a better chance of never even seeing, let alone meeting or having to share the same breathing space with the Dark-Hued Scions of Satan, Hallmarks of the End Times. Let us never have to actually live with or face the environmental destruction we've engineered, the poverty we've created, or the msssive social disruption and disease our denial has caused. Let us run, run, RUN from the degradations of the corrupt national government we voted for, from its private armies and its wars of greed and ignorance, from its bombast and its cruelty to the weakest among us so that we may continue to pretend it isn't happening, which we can do if we don't have to look at it every day. Let us escape from the world we have made for Others to live in, and let our fantasies be perpetuated ad infinitum. All this we ask IN THE NAME OF THE CHILDREN! We're just thinking of them....

Sure you are. This, it turns out, is the latest Right Wing Meme, and Puppet Dave is simply joining the chorus, as he is expected to and has to if he wants to keep getting those Big Bucks as the NYT's supposed centrist. How do I know? Because Brooks himself says so.

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

Um, Boston is a 'childless city'? That's going to come as a surprise to the taxpayers footing the bills for new schools because the old ones are over-crowded, not to mention to the strollers on the Common who wade every day through acres of kids playing hopskotch and jumping rope and trying to climb the trees.

Let's face it, campers. We're scum, and that's all there is to it. We hate America, and that's Bad. We don't hate integration, and that's even Worse. But the Worst of all is that We Hate Kids. And since we aren't running out having 6 of them like every Red-blooded Red Stater, thus ignoring the Biblical order to Multiply, we must Hate the Bible as well. No wonder Ann 'The Medusa' Coulter wants us all put up against a wall and shot. We're Evil, Evil, Evil. So sayeth the Lord.

And David Brooks, of course.

Last week I wrote that reading major newspapers was becoming an exercise in which you had to read between the lines as if they were Pravda. Somebody I read after I wrote that reminded us that there were never any censorship laws or government edicts in Soviet Russia or any of the other Communist countries whose press were uniformly pinging the govt line: they did it to themselves. They knew which side of the bread the butter was on, and they loaded it up. But the same can be said of all the media, including and maybe especially television news.

Broadcast television is a mass-market outlet, which means that catering to the LCD has always been part of the tension in its make-up. From the moment in 1925 when commercial radio moved out of the limited land of local news and found ways to do remote broadcasting so they could cover the Scopes trial in Tennessee, the American mass media has been hoisted on a petard not of its own making, really. A majority of its audience demanded that the reporting they heard reflect the views they held, but that majority itself shifted as the trial went on. Darrow's remarkable cross-examination of Bryan--the head of the prosecution team--as a 'Bible expert' turned enough of the audience around (not on whether or not they believed the Bible, but on whether or not they thought a religious belief should be enshrined in law) that by the end of the trial, a slim majority had moved to Darrow's side, including some of the people who were nevertheless convinced he was The Devil.

Newspapers--who by and large backed Darrow--were no doubt a factor, and a large one, in that change, but the impact of hearing the trial live, on the radio, was for the first time just as important to the shaping of public opinion as reading about it. What radio news learned in the process--painfully, in some cases--was that power was a 2-edged sword. Yes it turned heads, changed minds, and garnered some respectability and a vastly enlarged audience, but it also found itself caught in a trap of expectations. The Scopes trial was as polarizing then as the evolution vs creationism issue is now, and both sides expected their beliefs to be mirrored in the news. Whichever side felt slighted--and that was usually both of them--made sure to tell the owners and managers about it in no uncertain terms.

As I read the history, it seems to me that newspapers at the time were mostly modeled on William Randolph Hearst's concept of 'yellow journalism', a combination of outspoken advocacy, unapologetic antogonism, and outright lies: if it will sell papers, Hearst felt, it doesn't matter if it's true. Being in the paper makes it true. (Orson Welles' depiction of Hearst in Citizen Kane, loathful as it is, was actually a lot kinder to Hearst than he deserved. The truth is even worse.) The Baltimore Sun could send an avowed atheist like HL Mencken to cover the Scopes trial without suffering threats of retaliation from its audience. Radio, on the other hand, could not. The slightest hint of favoritism or bias brought howls of outrage from listeners, even if that bias was largely in their imaginations.

And radio--like television after it--had to worry about renewing its broadcasting licenses. It was not then the automatic rubber-stamping process it is now. If enough complaints were generated, it was entirely possible that the govt would shut them down or at least refuse to renew their license to operate. Either way, pissing off the public could result in the loss of your business, so pissing off the public was very early on considered a Bad Idea--the opposite of Hearst's contention that pissing off the public was a good way to increase a newspaper's circulation. Of course, Hearst didn't have to worry about the govt pulling his license to operate newspapers.

The Hauptmann circus trial a few years later tended to confirm the lesson of the Scopes trial. Public opinion had convicted Bruno Hauptmann of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's infant son as soon as his arrest was announced. Newspapers that didn't fall into line behind that overwhelming public sentiment paid the price: blistering letters published in rival papers, canceled ads, boycotts, pickets outside their editorial offices, and falling circulation. The whole country, it seemed, was focused on making sure Hauptmann was hanged, and 'evidence' played zero part in their decision. They wanted somebody to pay for what had been done to their hero, and that somebody was Bruno Hauptmann: the police had arrested him, therefore he must be guilty. It was really as simple as that. The LCD had spoken.

Radio avoided the costs associated with taking an unpopular stand by, at first, taking no stand at all. They concentrated on simply reporting developments and, when the trial started, they even largely ceased doing that since virtually everyone with a radio was listening to the trial live. They learned a valuable lesson: stay out of the controversy, pander to the audience, and let the live broadcasts speak for themselves. Newspapers didn't have that option--news was in some way filtered just because it had to be written down, inserting a writer between the audience and the experience itself. Newspapers were vicarious experience; radio was direct experience: you heard it live, unedited, just as it happened. You Were There. That immediacy could do all the work; no one could blame the radio for anything the defense attorneys tried to say--it was just an instrument, like a camera, and it recorded what happened.

Pioneer radio broadcasters like Edward R Murrow and owners like General Sarnoff took the message to heart: mass market media did better when it tried to be objective and stayed the hell out of the heated fray of controversy. But if it had to get involved, to make sure it was involved on the side of the LCD, not opposing it. Of course, Murrow and Sarnoff represented two entirely different motivations; however much they might agree about the desirability of 'objectivity' as a fundamental principle, their reasons were completely different and often in opposition to each other. Where Sarnoff was worried about keeping his advertisers and audiences happy, Murrow was worried about intangible values like truth and accuracy in reporting, and the obligation of the press in a free country to inform the people and let the chips fall where they may.

As a democratic country, we got lucky: Murrow's side won the argument at first, and for the thirty years between the heavy onset of the Depression and the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 which galvanized conservatives into deciding to take over the 'liberal' media which consistently backed Johnson--in their eyes--by not condemning him, we had a reasonably objective press. Especially when the first real challenge to journalistic independence, the rise of Joe McCarthy, had its back broken in the 50's by none other than Murrow, and on prime-time tv, at that. There was a brief Golden Age before Watergate enraged conservatives even more--or at least as much--as the Civil Rights Bill and opposition to the Viet Nam War, and then it was over.

Reagan inspired all the mothering instincts of a disappointed, angry class who saw its privileges--and therefore its power--slipping away. He was the Messiah who was going to give it all back, and 'they' would have to destroy him to stop it. The DAC wasn't going to allow that, wasn't going to allow the 'media' to bring down the Great White Hope of ultra-conservative agitators desperately trying to take us back to the future--all the way back to the 19th century, if they could manage it. They could. And they did.

Which may help to begin to explain a little how we got here.

TV remains by far the most prevalent source of news for Americans. We need honest information to help us navigate, not bunkum skewed to flatter one segment of the country, whatever that segment might be. Yet here's how Jeff Zucker, the NBC president, summed up the attributes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's successor, to Peter Johnson of USA Today: "No one understands this Nascar nation more than Brian." Mr. Zucker was in sync with his boss, Bob Wright, the NBC Universal chairman, who described America as a "red state world" on the eve of Mr. Brokaw's retirement. Though it may come as news to those running NBC, we actually live in a red-and-blue-state country, in a world that increasingly hates all our states without regard to our provincial obsession with their hues.

---

[T]he networks were often cautious about challenging government propaganda even before the election. (Follow-ups to the original Abu Ghraib story quickly fell off TV's radar screen.) As far back as last spring Ted Koppel's roll-call of the American dead on "Nightline," in which the only images were beatific headshots, was condemned as a shocking breach of decorum by the mostly red-state ABC affiliates that refused to broadcast it. If full-scale Nascarization is what's coming next, there will soon be no pictures but those promising a mission accomplished, no news but good news. And that's good news only if you believe America has something to gain by fighting a war in the dark.

The tension between the Murrow belief in accurate reporting and damn the consequences and Sarnoff's belief in the LCD pandering that generates profits has at last been resolved, and the new Ed Murrow is--Brian Williams.

And the 'values' of bleed/lead-think/stink local news in the hands of a standard pretty-boy come to the Big Top.

I don't have a tv, but if I did, I think I'd probably stop watching it.

I have been busy putting together the next Blog Tower. Below are several really excellent posts I won't be able to include, but I wouldn't want you to miss them.

• Kathy at RTOP has been on fire this week, especially yesterday. She has at least four posts that are Must-Reads:
  
  
  1. The New Law of the Land - We Can Do Anything We Want To

     Lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo Bay are in court trying to make the case that the military tribunals set up in response to the Supreme Court's judgment that detainees can challenge their status do not meet the requirements of the law.
     
     The government's case seems to be an "all is fair in times of war" argument. They say that they have to be able to detain anyone, anywhere, any time, with any connections to terrorism.
     
     Who might fall into the government's broad sweep? A little old lady in Sweden writing a check to a charity that she doesn't know supports terrorism. A teacher who has students with Taliban connections. A man who doesn't report suspicions that his cousin may be an al Qaeda leader, a reporter who in protecting a source doesn't report the location of a terrorist leader.
     
     We aren't talking about people in the war zone. We're talking about anyone anywhere in the world. "The boundaries of a war on terrorism are unlimited", says the government attorney.

  
  
  2. A Pseudo-Theocracy in the Making

     I'm beginning to develop the seeds of what could be a persistent and deeply rooted conspiracy theory that we really are at risk of becoming a pseudo-theocracy. I've been reading up on the politicized religious right, trying to understand who they are, what they want, how they work, who they know, and how far their reach extends. The short answer is that they work through a broad network including churches, non-profits, and media outlets, they want a Christian nation in which God's law (their interpretation) supercedes man's law, they know the people in power and their reach extends into most areas of government.

  
  
  3. Tax Reform I: Are You Ready to Pay More?

     We didn't hear a lot about it in the campaign, but one of Bush's top domestic agenda items is tax reform. Bush wants to cut and possibly even eliminate taxes on investment income - interest, dividends, and capital gains. But how to pay for those cuts? The administration is considering eliminating a few tax deductions.
     
     First, there's the individual deduction of state and local taxes off federal income tax. According to the administration, allowing us to deduct those taxes - especiallly property tax - ultimately lowers the price of local public services and gives an unfair advantage to local government over private companies providing comparable services.
     
     If I understand this correctly, the argument is that by allowing this deduction, we pay our local government less to do things like pave roads and maintain fire departments - that we're charged less by the government than we would be by private companes. That's unfair competition.

  
  
  4. Tax Reform II: Ready to Lose Your Health Insurance?

     n an effort to fund the elimination of taxes on investment and savings - interest, capital gains, dividend taxes - the Bush team is looking at eliminating the deduction businesses take on the cost of health insurance for their employees.
     
     When I worked for a major corporation, I paid about $20/week for health insurance for myself - about $80/month. My company picked up the tab for the rest of the premium - around $200/month. The company paid signficantly more for folks who insured their whole families through the company policy. To make it simple, let's assume that the average monthly premium for an employee was $300 for a yearly cost of $3600. My company had 15,000 employees so they paid out $54 million every year for health benefits. And they get to deduct that - I'm fairly certain they get to deduct the entire amount. Even if I'm wrong and they only get to deduct 50%, that's still $27m. No business takes a $27m increase in costs lightly.
     
     The Bush administration would eliminate that deduction, which will cost my former employer up to $54 million. How many of you think that the company will simply reduce their profits by $54m? No.Instead, they'll pass the costs on to employees. They'll still provide some coverage, higher level staff will get their premiums subsidized at a high rate. Next level down will get subsidies but perhaps have to pick up the cost of covering their spouses and dependents. Low level staff will have to pay the entire premium. Small businesses will probably cut all payments for health insurance - simply making it available for employees to pay the whole thing themselves. They're already struggling to provide coverage - even with the deduction. Self-employed individuals will probably drop their coverage altogether.
     
     But hey, you won't have to pay taxes on your dividends.

  
  
  
  And I have a feeling she's not done with the tax issue. Stay on top of this--it's the clearest writing I've seen on exactly what we can expect, and it's from a perspective most of us can relate to.
  


• cul heath at ratboy's anvil has a few words to say about the Methodists recent 'conviction' of a minister for the crime of lesbianism.

  The Methodist church has a Supreme Court? Quite the method. Its really obvious that Christians have got to rid themselves of the Bible inerrancy addiction that is squashing all the love out of the idea of what it means to be a Christian. For one thing they seem to completely misunderstand that the whole point of the New Testament is to overturn the archaic rules and the absurdities that were part of the former covenent of the Old Testament.
  
  If they are going to nitpick about Leviticus when the take on the idea of homosexuality, then they have to start stoning people for the other stupid stuff like wearing two types of cloth at the same time, etc etc etc. Otherwise, they should shut the fuck up and stop judging people in a way that is completely contrary to what Jesus said about things.


Amen.


• David Neiwert at Orcinus lays out the truth about the Matthew Shepard case and puts paid to ABC's recent report.

  [T]he entire thrust of ABC's "revelations" -- that it was all a drug binge, not a hate crime -- reveals how little the reporters who worked on this understand not just bias crimes but criminal law generally. One factor, such as drug use, does not cancel out another, such as a bias motive. They often in fact appear together and work in conjunction.
  
  There's an even more significant problem with the 20/20 report, however: It is signficantly factually flawed.
  
  The flaw is not so much in what it reports, but what it intentionally omits.

Those should keep your brain humming over the weekend.

Yesterday, on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the BBC reported that a Union Carbide spokesman said that the company had accepted full responsibility for the disaster and was offering a $12BIL settlement to the survivors.

"Today I am very, very happy to announce that today, for the first time Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. This is a momentous occasion," he said in the live interview.

The world has been waiting to hear that for twenty years. Unfortunately it was have to wait a bit longer. The apology was a hoax.

The BBC's worldwide reputation for accuracy took a blow yesterday after it broadcast an interview with a hoaxer who claimed to offer a $12bn settlement to the 120,000 surviving victims of the Bhopal disaster.

Hopes were raised in India when the BBC's international news channel, BBC World, interviewed a man identified as a representative of Dow Chemical, which now runs the Bhopal plant after taking over Union Carbide.

He said Dow accepted full responsibility for the world's worst industrial disaster, which has claimed the lives of 20,000 people over the past 20 years, and left many more with chronic health problems.

But it soon emerged that Jude Finisterra was a hoaxer who has targeted Dow Chemical in the past. His interview, which was picked up and reported internationally, was shown twice on BBC World, and on BBC television and radio in Britain, before it was pulled.

Finisterra is a member of The Yes Men, an activist group that specializes in hoaxing global corporations and is most famous for penetrating the WTO posing as actual representatives. Two years ago, on the 18th anniversary, Finisterra sent out this press release from a website with the address Dow-Chemical.com purporting to come from the company:

December 3, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact press@dow-chemical.com

DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION
Company responds to activist concerns with concrete action points

In response to growing public outrage over its handling of the Bhopal disaster's legacy, Dow Chemical (http//www.dow-chemical.com) has issued a statement explaining why it is unable to more actively address the problem.

"We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," said Dow President and CEO Michael D. Parker. "But this just isn't true. Many individuals within Dow feel tremendous sorrow about the Bhopal disaster, and many individuals within Dow would like the corporation to admit its responsibility, so that the public can then decide on the best course of action, as is appropriate in any democracy. "Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step."

On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide--now part of Dow--accidentally killed 5,000 residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant sprung a leak. It abandoned the plant without cleaning it up, and since then, an estimated 15,000 more people have died from complications, most resulting from chemicals released into the groundwater.

Although legal investigations have consistently pinpointed Union Carbide as culprit, both Union Carbide and Dow have had to publicly deny these findings. After the accident, Union Carbide compensated victims' families between US$300 and US$500 per victim. "We understand the anger and hurt," said Dow Spokesperson Bob Questra. "But Dow does not and cannot acknowledge responsibility. If we did, not only would we be required to expend many billions of dollars on cleanup and compensation--much worse, the public could then point to Dow as a precedent in other big cases. 'They took responsibility; why can't you?' Amoco, BP, Shell, and Exxon all have ongoing problems that would just get much worse. We are unable to set this precedent for ourselves and the industry, much as we would like to see the issue resolved in a humane and satisfying way."

Shareholders reacted to the Dow statement with enthusiasm. "I'm happy that Dow is being clear about its aims," said Panaline Boneril, who owns 10,000 shares, "because Bhopal is a recurrent problem that's clogging our value chain and ultimately keeping the share price from expressing its full potential. Although a real solution is not immediately possible because of Dow's commitments to the larger industry issues, there is new hope in management's exceptional new clarity on the matter."

"It's a slow process," said Questra. "We must learn bit by bit to meet this challenge head-on. For now, this means acknowledging that much as it pains us, our prime responsibilities are to the people who own Dow shares, and to the industry as a whole. We simply cannot do anything at this moment for the people of Bhopal."

Dow Chemical is a chemical products and services company devoted to bringing its customers a wide range of chemicals. It furnishes solutions for the agriculture, electronics, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries, including well-known products like Styrofoam, DDT, and Agent Orange, as well as lesser-known brands like Inspire, Retain, Eliminator, Quash, and Woodstalk. For more on the Bhopal catastrophe, please visit Dow at http//www.dow-chemical.com/.

Needless to say, the press release was also a hoax. The Yes Men claim that they are merely attempting to counteract corporate hoaxing like this:

On November 29 last year, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen. The paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico, Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM crops.

Even before publication, the researchers knew their work was hazardous. One of them, Ignacio Chapela, was approached by the director of a Mexican corporation, who first offered him a glittering research post if he withheld his paper, then told him that he knew where to find his children. In the US, Chapela's opponents have chosen a different form of assassination.

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000 scientists, called AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy". Chapela is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer". Her posting was followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek", claiming, falsely, that Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and foremost an activist" and that the research had been published in collusion with environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked "how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements and other donations... for his help in misleading fear-based marketing campaigns?"

The messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made. Senior biotechnologists called for Chapela to be sacked from Berkeley. AgBioWorld launched a petition pointing to the paper's "fundamental flaws".

In fact, 'Mary Murphy' and 'Andura Smetacek' didn't exist. They were the inventions of a PR firm called The Bivings Group that had been hired by Monsanto to discredit Chapela's paper. Bivings specializes in 'internet marketing'.

An article on its website, entitled Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World, warns that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved... it simply is not an intelligent PR move. In cases such as this, it is important to first 'listen' to what is being said online... Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party... Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be considered seriously." A senior executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work".

The Yes Men are fighting fire with fire, or in this case, corporate manipulation with anti-corporate manipulation. Speaking for myself, I wish them well. Corporate hoaxes are becoming commonplace, a standard operating tool for businesses in trouble for shoddy products, inhuman practices, over-arching greed, illegal labor practices, and a raft of other depredations that increase their profits at everybody else's expense, including the planet's. Take the 'fake parade' technique, for instance.

"Carrying his placard the man in front of me was clearly one of the poorest of the poor. His shoes were not only threadbare, they were tattered, merely rags barely being held together."

So begins a graphic description of a demonstration that took place at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg.. The protesters were "mainly poor, virtually all black, and mostly women... street traders and farmers" with an unpalatable message. As an article in a South African periodical put it, "Surely this must have been the environmentalists' worst nightmare. Real poor people marching in the streets and demanding development while opposing the eco-agenda of the Green Left."

And seldom can the views of the poor, in this case a few hundred demonstrators, have been paid so much attention. Articles highlighting the Johannesburg march popped up the world over, in Africa, North America, India, Australia and Israel. In Britain even The Times ran a commentary, under the heading, "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me".

With the summit's passing, the Johannesburg march, far from fading from view, has taken on a still deeper significance. In the November issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, Val Giddings, the President of the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO), argues that the event marked "something new, something very big" that will make us "look back on Johannesburg as something of a watershed event—a turning point." What made the march so pivotal, he said, was that for the very first time, "real, live, developing-world farmers" were "speaking for themselves" and challenging the "empty arguments of the self-appointed individuals who have professed to speak on their behalf."

To help give them a voice, Giddings singles out the statement of one of the marchers, Chengal Reddy, leader of the Indian Farmers Federation. "Traditional organic farming...," Reddy says, "led to mass starvation in India for centuries... Indian farmers need access to new technologies and especially to biotechnologies."

Giddings also notes that the farmers expressed their contempt for the "empty arguments" of many of the Earth Summiteers by honoring them with a "Bullshit Award" made from two varnished piles of cow dung. The award was given, in particular, to the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, for her role in "advancing policies that perpetuate poverty and hunger"

A powerful rebuke, no doubt. But if anyone deserves the cow dung, it is the President of BIO, for almost every element of the spectacle he describes has been carefully contrived and orchestrated. Take, for instance, Chengal Reddy, the "farmer" that Giddings quotes. Reddy is not a poor farmer, nor even the representative of poor farmers. Indeed, there is precious little to suggest he is even well-disposed towards the poor. The "Indian Farmers Federation" that he leads is a lobby of big commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh. On occasion Reddy has admitted to knowing very little about farming, having never farmed in his life. He is, in reality, a politician and businessman whose family are a prominent right-wing political force in Andhra Pradesh—his father having coined the saying, "There is only one thing Dalits (members of the untouchable caste) are good for, and that is being kicked".

In fact, the 'march' was the brainchild of yet another conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who staged the whole thing in a deliberate attempt to use one of the few tools the poor have to call attention to their plight, the demonstration, against them. It was then organized by one Kendra Okonski, who turns out to be...

...the daughter of a US lumber industrialist who has worked for various right wing anti-regulatory NGOs—all funded and directed, needless to say, by "whites". These include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based "think tank" whose multi-million dollar budget comes from major US corporations, among them BIO member Dow Chemicals. Okonski also runs the website Counterprotest.net, where her specialty is helping right wing lobbyists take to the streets in mimicry of popular protesters.

And the 'Bullshit Award'? Surely that was real.

Nope.

Giddings' "Bullshit Award" was far from, as he suggests, the imaginative riposte of impoverished farmers to India's most celebrated environmentalist. It was, in fact, the creation of another right-wing pressure group—the Liberty Institute—based in New Delhi and well known for its fervent support of deregulation, GM crops and Big Tobacco.

The Liberty Institute is part of the same network that organized the rally: the deceptively-named "Sustainable Development Network." In London, the SDN shares offices, along with many of its key personnel—including Okonski—with the International Policy Network, a group whose Washington address just happens to be that of the CEI. The SDN is run by Julian Morris, its ubiquitous director, who also claims the title of Environment and Technology Programme Director for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that has advocated, amongst other interesting ideas, that African countries be sold off to multinational corporations in the interests of "good government".

These guys are just loaded with good ideas--and good will. They're good-willing to buy resource-rich countries (which they would, of course, exploit for 'everyone's benefit') in the purely altruistic hope of bringing 'good government' (and we'd like to hear how they'd define that particular term) to the masses downtrodden by govts with an insufficient understanding that the way to peace and harmony is for the corporations to own everything. Including whole nations. What's a little hoax compared to such lofty goals? It's justified by a 'greater good'.

Profits.

So to The Yes Men and anybody else who wants to take these suckers on, I say: 'Go, bro, with my blessing.'