A Radical in the White House

The New York Times
April 18, 2005

A Radical in the White House
By BOB HERBERT

Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.

That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.

To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.

After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."

Among these rights, he said, are:

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.

"The right of every family to a decent home.

"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

"The right to a good education."

I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."

Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the 1950's and 60's the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the war in Vietnam and the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon.

It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert Dallek put it, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head Start. Mr. Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start. But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the leaders of the G.O.P. gang (the members should all wear masks) that has executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to the very rich.

Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.

The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.

"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

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A Whiff of Stagflation

The New York Times
April 18, 2005

A Whiff of Stagflation
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In the 1970's soaring prices of oil and other commodities led to stagflation - a combination of high inflation and high unemployment, which left no good policy options. If the Fed cut interest rates to create jobs, it risked causing an inflationary spiral; if it raised interest rates to bring inflation down, it would further increase unemployment.

Can it happen again?

Last week fears of a return to stagflation sent stock prices to a five-month low. What few seem to have noticed, however, is that a mild form of stagflation - rising inflation in an economy still well short of full employment - has already arrived.

True, measured unemployment isn't bad by historical standards, and inflation is in the low single digits. But inflation is creeping up, and it's doing so despite a labor market that is in worse shape than the official unemployment rate suggests.

Let's start with the jobs picture. The official unemployment rate is 5.2 percent - roughly equal to the average for the Clinton years.

But unemployment statistics only count those who are actively looking for jobs. Every other indicator shows a situation much less favorable to workers than that of the 1990's. A lower fraction of the adult population is employed; the average duration of unemployment - a rough indicator of how long it takes laid-off workers to find new jobs - is much higher than it was in the 1990's.

Above all, the weak job market leaves workers with no bargaining power, so they aren't getting ahead: wage increases have been minimal, and haven't kept up with inflation.

Underlying these disappointing numbers is sluggish job creation. Private-sector employment is still lower than it was before the 2001 recession.

Things could be, and have been, worse. But those whose standard of living depends on wages, not capital gains - in other words, the vast majority of Americans - aren't feeling particularly prosperous. By two to one, people tell pollsters that the economy is "only fair" or "poor," not "good" or "excellent."

Why, then, has the Fed been raising interest rates? Because it is worried about inflation, which has risen to the top end of the 2 to 3 percent range the Fed prefers.

What's driving inflation? Not wages: labor costs have been falling, because wages are growing less than productivity. Oil prices are a big part of the story, but not all of it. Other commodity prices are also rising; health care costs are once again on the march. And a combination of capacity shortages, rising Asian demand and a weakening dollar has given industries like cement and steel new "pricing power."

It all adds up to a mild case of stagflation: inflation is leading the Fed to tap on the brakes, even though this doesn't look or feel like a full-employment economy.

We shouldn't overstate the case: we're not back to the economic misery of the 1970's. But the fact that we're already experiencing mild stagflation means that there will be no good options if something else goes wrong.

Suppose, for example, that the consumer pullback visible in recent data turns out to be bigger than we now think, and growth stalls. (Not that long ago many economists thought that an oil price in the 50's would cause a recession.) Can the Fed stop raising interest rates and go back to rate cuts without causing the dollar to plunge and inflation to soar?

Or suppose that there's some kind of oil supply disruption - or that warnings about declining production from Saudi oil fields turn out to be right. Suppose that Asian central banks decide that they already have too many dollars. Suppose that the housing bubble bursts. Any of these events could easily turn our mild case of stagflation into something much more serious.

How do we get out of this bind? As the old joke goes, I wouldn't start from here. We should have spent the years of cheap oil encouraging conservation; we should have spent the years of modest growth in medical costs reforming our health care system. Oh, and we'd have a wider range of policy options if the budget weren't so deeply in deficit.

So if any of these things does come to pass, we'll just have to see how well an administration in which political operatives make all economic policy decisions, and the Treasury secretary is only a salesman, handles crises.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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Terrorism Tempers Shift to Openness

washingtonpost.com
Terrorism Tempers Shift to Openness

By Craig Whitlock and Steve Coll
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 18, 2005; Page A01

Second of two articles

RABAT, Morocco -- They have testified in community centers, schoolhouses and municipal halls, and on live television. They have been withered mothers, grieving grandchildren, scarred old men -- a diverse parade of ordinary Moroccans bound by a common experience of political terror. This year, they have become players in a national spectacle almost unheard of in the Arab world: an official investigation into past government abuses.

"My story is that of thousands of Moroccans," said Jamal Ameziane, 52, who testified that 30 members of his family were harassed or tortured after his father was forced to flee the country in the late 1950s. "I dream of lifting the veil on the dark years."

Between Morocco's independence in 1956 and the early 1980s, known as the "years of lead," the government of King Hassan II locked up thousands of Marxists, rebellious military officers and others opposed to the monarchy without fair trials. Many were tortured and killed; others simply vanished. Now Hassan's son and successor, King Mohammed VI, has encouraged a public exhumation of these events. Morocco's Equity and Reconciliation Commission has so far filed reports of more than 22,000 cases of repression. Its stated purpose is to ensure that such abuses never recur in Morocco.

Yet even as the hearings unfold, a new generation of aggrieved relatives and angry defendants is being born in Morocco. Alarmed by evidence that al Qaeda-inspired cells have taken root here -- a threat made plain by suicide bombings on May 16, 2003, that killed 45 and wounded scores more -- security forces have arrested more than 2,100 people. About 1,000 remain in prison, and some have leveled torture allegations. The government denies them and defends its crackdown as essential to national security.

Morocco's forward-and-backward steps on civil liberties reflect a wider pattern across the Arab world, as reformers and governments debate the pace and potential of democratic change. Continuing recruitment and violent attacks by radical Islamic groups in North Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the smaller emirates of the Persian Gulf region are encouraging Arab governments to adopt sometimes draconian security regimes even as they consider a new era of political openness.

Democratic reform and effective counterterrorism measures may not be mutually exclusive, but in Arab countries with little experience of pluralism and long records of harsh treatment of dissidents, the balance is proving difficult to define and establish.

Saudi Arabia's monarchy staged its first limited elections in four decades this winter, but at the same time the government launched a massive sweep against al Qaeda that resulted in scores of detentions, pressure on dissident writers and recruitment of thousands of neighborhood police informers, according to Saudi officials and independent human rights researchers. In neighboring Kuwait, where Islamic radicals staged a rare series of attacks this winter against security forces, parliament held a secret emergency session to endorse new laws to strengthen police powers.

The recent crackdowns have been encouraged and supported with training and equipment by the Bush administration, which publicly is pressing Arab governments to move toward democracy. "We are concerned and puzzled by this double talk on the part of the United States," Moroccan Justice Minister Mohamed Bouzoubaa said in an interview. "If we do fight terrorism, we are told, 'You went too far.' If we don't, we are told, 'You have not done enough.' "

This spring, al Qaeda-inspired violence against local targets has surged in parts of the Middle East, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Resulting crackdowns by Gulf states have had strong popular support, as wealthy societies that long felt insulated from Osama bin Laden's wrath have reacted with revulsion to a wave of violence that began in Riyadh in 2003 and appears to be spreading to Saudi Arabia's smaller neighbors.

After a suicide bomber drove a truck into a British community theater on March 19 in Doha during a performance of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," killing one Briton and wounding about a dozen people of diverse nationalities, Qataris rallied in the streets to back their monarchy as it rounded up potential radicals.

In Kuwait, recent security sweeps aimed at al Qaeda have dismayed some of the emirate's weak liberal groupings, which are often ad hoc or located in places such as universities or business chambers because formal political parties are banned.

Some democracy campaigners say they fear that more stringent security laws will be used against them. Others emphasize that a long, systematic campaign led by the monarchy may be required to suppress violent Islamic groups that were allowed to flourish in Kuwait over decades -- and that such a campaign may necessarily slow political reforms.

Morocco and Kuwait, monarchies at opposite ends of the Arab world that have moved faster than many of their neighbors to adopt political reforms, offer case studies of how the simultaneous pursuit of democratic change and repression of terrorism has created new sources of tension and uncertainty.
Kuwait's Ideological Battle

On a sunny weekday afternoon, the curb outside Kuwait University's business school was lined with BMW 7-Series and Mercedes E-Class sedans, Land Rovers and Lexus sports cars. Students drifted by in mixed fashions: neatly pressed traditional robes, American football jerseys, hip-hugging bluejeans, Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Some of the young women covered themselves in scarves or a fuller hijab; a few did not. They chatted with the men outside, but as they turned to their classrooms, they entered a newly constructed world of strict segregation.

Kuwait University's student union, the student government representing an enrolled population of about 18,000, is the largest fully democratic institution in the oil-gushing kingdom. Unlike in voting for the emirate's parliament, which is restricted to men 21 and older who are not soldiers or police officers, both men and women are eligible to vote and seek office in the student union.

The outcome is that student life at Kuwait University is dominated by a coalition of tradition-bound, sometimes anti-American Islamic groups that have harassed young women about their dress, forced the university to build expensive separate facilities for male and female students, split sections of the faculty into bitter ideological factions, and helped ignite a national debate about the risks and benefits of political liberalization.

Islamic groups rule not only the student union, but Kuwait's national teachers union, other professional associations and scores of charities and businesses. When these civic organizations have held elections during the last decade, Islamic groups frequently have swept to power.

The best known of these is the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-rooted international network that recruits from elite professions and advocates Islamic government, usually by peaceful means. In the past, the Brotherhood has been connected with political violence in Egypt and elsewhere, but it is seen by some Western analysts as moving toward ordinary politics.

In Kuwait's parliament and at its national university, the Brotherhood jockeys with two rival Islamic groupings that adhere to Salafism, a school of Islam patterned on the earliest days of the faith. Among other things, some Salafi preachers and writers have emphasized the illegitimacy of non-Muslims and are accused by Kuwaiti liberals of providing ideological succor to violent radicals, such as those who attacked security forces in January and February.

All of the openly political Islamic networks recruit young leaders at Kuwait University, cultivating student union officers as future organizers and potential candidates for parliament. Their adversaries charge that the religious groups maintain clandestine, indirect ties to violent Islamic radical cells, but no clear evidence has been produced.

Because of the recent and unprecedented violence, a long-simmering contest between Islamic groups and urban liberals over Kuwait's political and cultural identity has intensified, just as the wider Arab world debates the risks and benefits of rapid political liberalization.

"The fight between liberals and fundamentalists is over terrorism," said Shamlan Essa, director of Kuwait University's Center for Strategic and Future Studies. "Every week there's a young Kuwaiti who dies in Iraq. Who sends these young people? . . . The real criminals, nobody touches them -- the politicians, some of them in parliament, and the preachers who are connected with them."

In a conference room beside Essa's campus office sat political science professor Ahmad Baghdadi, expounding bitterly on a court verdict he had received the day before. For writing in a newspaper column that he believed "learning music is more important than learning the holy Koran," Baghdadi was sentenced to either two years in prison or a $6,000 fine -- a clear signal, he said, of the rising power of Islamic radicals in Kuwait, including those brought to power by elections.

"The government is not strong enough to face all these problems between liberals and Islamists," Baghdadi said. Instead of resolving basic constitutional issues such as the relationship between government and religion, the ruling Sabah family prefers to suppress all dissent, Baghdadi argued, while creating only a veneer of democracy. "This is the easiest solution: 'Everybody shut up.' . . . This is what you call despotic."

Immediately after the attacks in Kuwait this year, said Mohammed Jassem, editor of al-Watan newspaper, the prime minister tried to intimidate editors and sought broad powers to close newspapers in the name of national security. "The government will use the security issues to implement their dreams of political control," Jassem said.

Popular anger about violence has nonetheless put Islamic groups on the defensive this spring.

Islamic activists in parliament denounced this winter's attacks and lent credibility to the government's security crackdown. "Let us play our role in putting the peaceful message to these groups," said Naser J. Sane, a Muslim Brotherhood member in the National Assembly. "Let us give support to Muslim scholars to play their role. Without these scholars, young people will misunderstand Islam and use it in a militant way."

But urban liberals and other rivals of the Islamic groups, such as leaders of Kuwait's minority Shiite Muslims, while crediting members like Sane with a constructive role, see elected Islamic activists as double-edged swords at best.

"Not all of them are radicals and extremists," said Hasan A. Joer, a Shiite member of parliament. "But they have links with each other. You need a very slow and moderate process to contain them."

"The government wants to use" the Islamic activists in parliament, said Masoumah Mubarak, a women's suffrage activist, "but on the other hand, they are using the government."

As part of its sweep against al Qaeda, Kuwait's government this winter closed more than 100 illegal Islamic charities whose fundraising kiosks and publicity booths had been tolerated on the emirate's streets for years. Liberal activists applauded the clampdown but complained that their own efforts to open secular civic groups such as human rights organizations had been stifled, even as the royal family had long accepted the Islamic charities.

Near the center of Kuwait's debate about democracy today lies a fear among both the royal family and the major urban merchant families that their country's golden egg -- its bountiful oil, which has made Kuwait one of the world's wealthiest and most privileged societies from top to bottom -- may be under slow assault from religious groups that seek not pluralism but power.

Many of Kuwait's Islamic activists "believe democracy has been imported from outside and that it is alien for our culture, even as they participate in the elections and have their members in the parliament," said Ahmad R. Haroun, director general of the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "Maybe they are using this for other goals."
A New Direction in Morocco

Under Mohammed VI, Morocco's democratic reforms have gone further than Kuwait's, creating more vigorous and varied competition among numerous legal political parties and turning the kingdom into one of the most open and democratic-leaning countries in the Arab world.

Parliamentary elections were held in 2002 and municipal elections a year later. A boisterous free press has emerged. Last year, the king pushed lawmakers -- over the objections of some Islamic groups -- to approve a new family legal code giving more rights to women and children.

The liberalizing atmosphere, however, changed suddenly after the May 16, 2003, suicide bombings in Casablanca. Within days, Parliament passed an anti-terrorism law that gave the government broad powers to detain people considered a threat to the state. Of 2,100 people arrested on suspicion of terrorism, only a small fraction were accused of playing a role in the Casablanca attacks.

Mustapha Ramid, a leader of the Party for Justice and Democracy, said the crackdown was a severe setback for Morocco's democratic movement. "We have witnessed the return of things that we thought were behind us, like kidnapping and torture and unfair trials," he said. "After May 16, we went back completely to the old days."

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, documented cases of secret detention, abuse and suspension of due process. For months, Moroccan officials said the allegations were exaggerated and argued there was no proof that torture occurred.

But in January, the king acknowledged that the roundup was overzealous. "There is no doubt that there may have been arbitrary detentions," he told the Spanish newspaper El Pais in a rare interview.

U.S. Ambassador Thomas T. Riley said the post-May 16 arrests were excessive but understandable, given that the country's leaders were completely taken aback by the bombings and did not know the extent of the domestic terrorist threat. "I would say under the circumstances that it was an overreaction, but not a surprising one," he said.

But many democracy activists said they worried that the king took advantage of the attacks to consolidate his power. Morocco's constitution still gives the king absolute authority to dissolve Parliament and the government, and to rule by royal decree.

Last year, in a scene reminiscent of the years of lead, police forcibly disrupted a protest outside the central prison in Kenitra -- a longtime detention center for political prisoners -- organized by family members of jailed Islamic fundamentalists. The Moroccan Human Rights Association reported that several inmates were being held in isolation and deprived of medical care. The government has ignored the complaints and taken no official action, according to the State Department, which cited the incident in its annual report card on human rights.

"There is no political will to go very far in making democratic changes," said Abdelaziz Nouaydi, a constitutional law scholar and member of the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights. "There is an assumption in Morocco that the state has had its glasnost already."

Prince Moulay Hicham, a cousin of the king who has irritated the palace by calling upon the monarchy to give up some of its powers, said Morocco missed "a big window of opportunity" to bolster its democracy during the first two years of Mohammed's rule, which began in 1999.

"The responsibility is collective for that missed opportunity," he said. "Certainly, the monarchy is partly to blame. The political parties are to blame. The political elites share the blame, too. It has been squandered by everybody."

"The national sport in the politics of Morocco is waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting -- and not rocking the boat."

Many Moroccans have pinned their hopes for more democracy on the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up by the king before the Casablanca bombings but only began holding public hearings in December.

The voices those hearings have produced -- and the sense of political possibility they suggest -- have resonated with Moroccans well beyond a mere process of fact-finding or criminal investigation.

In January, in an overflowing school auditorium in the small desert town of Figuig, near the Algerian border, Mohamed Boudrara, 57, testified about the three years he spent as a political prisoner in the 1970s and how fellow inmates at the Corbis detention center in Casablanca went insane.

"My testimony is one of the collective memory of the Moroccan wound," he said. "When an individual is tortured, it is all of society that is harmed in its dignity and freedom."

The investigative commission has been accused of being too meek, criticisms that reflect Morocco's new openness and rising expectations.

Domestic human rights groups have complained that the panel stopped televising its public hearings and have chafed at the government-imposed restriction on victims naming their torturers or repressors. For all the emotional testimony, no one has yet been held accountable.

Members of the commission said they recognized the limitations but defended the process. Salah Ouadie, a political prisoner in the 1970s who serves on the panel, said there was no comparison between the years of lead and Morocco's human rights record today. The country is zigzagging forward, he insisted.

"We've come a long way," Ouadie said. "All the people came and said what they had to say, and they told the truth. They went very far and said things that were never said in Morocco before."

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Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile at Risk

Yahoo! News
Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile at Risk

Sun Apr 17, 1:00 AM ET

By David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer

Just three years after the largest and most serious shortage of childhood vaccines in two decades, the federal government's stockpile of childhood vaccines, designed as a buffer against shortages, is nearly empty -- and without immediate prospects of being filled.

Three of the four companies that produce the shots recommended for every American child told the federal government last year that they would not sell their products to this little-known but important piece of the nation's public health infrastructure.

Although opinions differ, it appears that the Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile has become an innocent bystander wounded in the government's crackdown on deceptive accounting practices.

No one has accused the vaccine manufacturers of wrongdoing. However, they can no longer treat as revenue the money they get when they sell millions of doses of vaccine to the stockpile because the shots are not delivered until the government calls for them in emergencies. Instead, the vials are held in the manufacturers' warehouses, where they are considered unsold in the eyes of auditors, investors and Wall Street.

Today, the stockpile contains 13.2 million doses of vaccine, less than one-third of the goal of 41 million doses. It is supposed to hold supplies of eight shots that together protect against 11 childhood diseases. However, for two of those products -- including the workhorse DTaP, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis -- it contains no doses. The vaccine is not in storage in company warehouses or anywhere else. It simply does not exist.

Created by Congress in 1983, the stockpile is supposed to contain enough vaccine to supply the nation's needs for six months. Its virtual collapse is an acute embarrassment to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the vaccine makers.

The stockpile has never reached its full target amounts, but its depleted state now means the nation could not easily weather another big vaccine shortage, potentially putting the health of millions of children at risk. Only two vaccines -- measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), and varicella (chickenpox) -- are warehoused in the desired amounts.

Memories are still fresh of 2001 and 2002, when the country did not have adequate supplies of five vaccines that together protect against eight diseases. That shortage did not lead to an increase in death or disease, but it did require physicians and clinics to ration and temporarily change the routine schedule of shots.

In testimony before Congress, Walter A. Orenstein, then head of CDC's National Immunization Program, called the situation "unique and unprecedented."

Last winter, the United States experienced a shortage of influenza vaccine. That product is not in the pediatric stockpile, but the near hysteria that erupted when contamination in a factory cut the supply of flu shots in half was further evidence of how vulnerable the nation is to the decisions and fortunes of the few remaining U.S. vaccine makers.

Although there have been informal discussions among the CDC, HHS, the Securities and Exchange Commission, vaccine companies and congressional staffers, there has been no concerted effort to find a solution that will persuade the companies to resume sales.

"If it was up to me, I'd start the meeting at 1 o'clock, lock the door, and wouldn't let anyone leave until they had found a solution," said Jerome O. Klein, a pediatrician at Boston University School of Medicine and a member of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee.

Klein's frustration is starting to be reflected in Congress.

"It's inexcusable that even though the administration had the money for this, they haven't made any progress," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (news, bio, voting record) (D-Calif.) said recently. "I don't care how they solve it -- they should just solve it."

The ranking Democrat on the Committee on Government Reform, Waxman said he is willing to sponsor legislation to carve out a legal exception that would allow companies to "recognize" revenue from sales to the vaccine stockpile -- if such a radical step becomes necessary. One of the companies, however, said its problem is not with "revenue recognition" but with the details of managing the vaccine inventory.

Other parties were reluctant to discuss possible solutions or who, if anyone, is to blame for the empty shelves. The SEC, which enforces accounting practices, would not speak on the record. HHS officials would not make available the person talking to the SEC on the matter. The department referred questions to its subordinate agency, the CDC, whose officials said important decisions about the stockpile are being made at the department level.

The firms that have stopped selling vaccine to the stockpile provided some information. Merck & Co. Inc., the one company still making new contracts with CDC, was silent.

The stockpile's usefulness is not theoretical. The government has gone into it nine times since 1984, the year after it was established. This was done to get vaccine for immediate use in a disease outbreak, or to prevent supply disruptions when a manufacturer had production problems or shut down a plant.

In January 2002, the government withdrew 700,000 doses of MMR vaccine when Merck, the manufacturer, had problems at a factory. In August 2003, CDC used 46,000 doses to fight a measles epidemic in the Marshall Islands.

In both cases, the government took out vaccine stored by the manufacturer but owned by HHS under a "buy-and-hold" contract. That long-standing arrangement benefits the government because it includes a provision to prevent the stockpiled vaccine from expiring and having to be discarded. While the government owns the vaccine, the companies are paid to store and rotate the stock. When a vial's shelf life falls below 12 months, it is sold on the open market and immediately replaced by newly made product.

Historically, companies could list as revenue the money they got for vaccine sold to the stockpile this way. That is no longer true.

Although the vaccine makers may use income from the sales any way they want, in accounting terms the money can no longer be "recognized" as revenue. Because the amounts of vaccine are large -- the stockpile has a target of 10 million doses of DTaP, for example -- excluding those sales from the bottom line makes some companies unhappy.

The accounting change came after the SEC issued a bulletin in December 1999 seeking to clear up confusion about revenue recognition.

Booking phony, theoretical or incomplete sales is the most common way companies make themselves look more profitable than they are. According to the Huron Consulting Group, over the past five years problems with revenue recognition were the leading reason U.S. corporations had to amend or refile financial reports. There were 253 such restatements last year, a record.

The SEC does not believe it created new accounting standards with its bulletin, but it gave companies a timetable for compliance. Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, which audits all four vaccine makers, sent clients an analysis in January 2001 noting that "we expect the implementation . . . to have a significant impact on the revenue recognition reporting practices of a number of [companies]."

The vaccine situation came to a head late last summer when CDC asked the manufacturers to make new sales to the stockpile. Three said no. Only Merck said yes.

Sanofi Pasteur (formerly Aventis Pasteur) wrote on Aug. 26: "Almost 2 years ago, AvP raised the 'revenue recognition' issue with CDC. . . . We understood from our conversations that we were the first manufacturer to do so. . . . We stated then that short of SEC changes in the interpretation of Staff Accounting Bulletin # 101, and/or changes to the stockpile terms, that AvP would be out of the stockpile business."

Wyeth, which had previously sold vaccines against polio and Haemophilus influenzae type b to the stockpile, did not mention revenue recognition when it, too, declined. Nor did GlaxoSmithKline, which had never participated. GlaxoSmithKline told CDC on Aug. 31 it would not sell DTaP, DTaP-hepatitis B-polio vaccine or hepatitis A vaccine until "the structure for a . . . stockpile agreement can be resolved."

A GlaxoSmithKline senior vice president, David Pernock, said that accounting issues are not a sticking point but that "costs associated with managing and rotating inventory" are.

All three companies say they support the idea of a stockpile. A Sanofi Pasteur vice president, Phil Hosbach, termed its diminished state "really a threat to public health."

Without a solution, the stockpile is likely only to get smaller, and its failure to meet its purpose even more glaring.

Neisseria meningitidis bacteria cause about 2,800 infections a year in the United States, many in college-age adults. Ten to 15 percent of those infected die, and up to 20 percent are made deaf or otherwise permanently disabled.

In January, the Food and Drug Administration approved a vaccine against N. meningitidis infection. Next month, CDC will add it to the list of shots all American youngsters should get -- which means it, too, should be stockpiled.

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In Oklahoma, a Week of Remembrance

The New York Times
April 18, 2005
In Oklahoma, a Week of Remembrance
By JOHN KIFNER

OKLAHOMA CITY, April 17 - The newest exhibit in the big museum here - the crown jewel, really - is a length of steel about eight feet long, ugly and twisted, its bulbous center rent by a nasty gash.

"This is the prime piece we waited for," said Kari F. Watkins, executive director of the museum, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, pausing amid preparations for ceremonies this week marking the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. "It is our prize possession."

It is the axle of the Ryder rental truck, a 1993 Ford with a 20-foot body packed with 4,800 pounds of homemade nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosives, that Timothy J. McVeigh detonated at 9:02 on the sunny morning of April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. The nation was stunned; it is still the worst act of domestic terrorism on American soil.

"That piece is why we really got McVeigh," Ms. Watkins said, as workers, volunteers and visitors bustled about the memorial of empty bronze chairs on the site of the building - "sacred ground," it is called - and the adjacent museum, which chronicles the dreadful event in gripping detail.

It was the vehicle identification number, PVA26077, stamped on the axle found a block away by local police, that led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to arrest Mr. McVeigh only moments before he was to be released from a small town jail 60 miles north on a minor traffic infraction.

The bombing was devastating - "Oklahoma City will never be the same," a reporter, Penny Owen, wrote on the front page of the next morning's Daily Oklahoman under a banner headline "Morning of Terror." But this is now a bustling place, with a spruced-up business district packed with new hotels, stadiums and a convention center; a renovated factory area called Bricktown attracting crowds to restaurants, bars and shops; and an annual arts festival, canceled the year of the bombing, now running alongside the weeklong memorial.

"We designed this week to send a signal to the world that there is hope," Ms. Watkins said. The symbol of the memorial is the Survivor Tree, a once-scraggly American elm that had stubbornly grown in a parking lot across the street. A car's hood came to rest in its limbs, which were largely stripped by the blast, but a year later leaves reappeared. Today, as one of the centerpieces of the memorial, it is one of the world's most pampered trees, with an elaborate aeration and watering system.

Tuesday, the anniversary of the bombing, will be a day of remembrance, with 168 seconds of silence and the reading of the names of the victims at 9 a.m., followed by a reunion and barbecue lunch for family members, survivors and rescuers in Bricktown. There are lectures and other events each day this week, with a concert on Friday night headlined by the country star Vince Gill and the fifth annual memorial marathon on Sunday, attracting some 12,000 runners.

The anniversary will also be a national news event. CNN has promised all-day coverage on Tuesday along with other special programs. The network morning shows will have a presence, and Brian Williams is to anchor the NBC news from here. There are already some 600 journalists and technicians registered from 87 news outlets, and on the sidewalk alongside the memorial this weekend workers were banging together risers for television and still cameras.

"This is the most we've had, including the execution, which I thought would be hard to top," said Ms. Watkins, speaking of the death of Mr. McVeigh on June 11, 2001. Terry L. Nichols, the other man indicted in the bombing, is serving life sentences on federal and state charges.

For many residents here the site is intensely personal. An estimated 387,000 people here, more than a third of the metropolitan area's population, knew someone who was killed or injured in the bombing, and some 190,000 people, 19 percent of the population, attended funerals for the victims. For relatives living here or scattered about the country, the memorial has become a place of pilgrimage.

About 50 members of the extended family of Mickey B. Maroney, a Secret Service agent who died in the explosion, were here for a reunion and memorial on Saturday, gathered mostly from Texas by his daughter, Alice Ann, who was tearing but composed as hugs were exchanged. A half-dozen fellow agents, hardly secret in black suits and wraparound sunglasses, stood at the edge of the group, sharing the sorrow.

"It's about all of us; it's about the journey we've taken the last 10 years," said Jack O'Brian Poe, chaplain for Oklahoma City's police department at the time and now for the Secret Service field office. "It's not a journey we would have chosen.

"It's painful, it's painful to do this," he went on, his right arm draped around the bronze chair bearing Mr. Maroney's name as if it were an old friend's shoulder. "This was some dark times. But we've seen the very best. We've seen America come together. We've seen Oklahoma City come together."

It is that mixed message of sadness and hope the memorial is intended to project.

The memorial is framed by two 13-ton yellow bronze monoliths called the Gates of Time, with the eastern entrance displaying the time 9:01, symbolizing the innocence before the bombing, and the western gate showing 9:03, the time of hurt and healing. In the center, what had been North Fifth Street has been turned into a shallow black reflecting pool.

On the site of the building, a sloping lawn holds the 168 stylized chairs, bronze with frosted glass bottoms etched with the name of each victim, smaller ones for the children, illuminated from the bottom at night. Five of the chairs, for those killed near the Murrah Building, are slightly separate. The rest are arranged in nine rows, for the nine stories of the structure, and are placed roughly where the bodies were found. The area is planted with loblolly pines, which in a decade are expected to grow to 90 feet, symbolizing the nine stories. On the eastern side is the only remaining wall from the Murrah building, with the names of more than 800 survivors etched onto two granite blocks retrieved from the ruins.

On the sidewalk outside is a remnant of the original "people's memorial," lengths of the chain-link fence that surrounded the wreckage. Spontaneously, the fence was decked with all manner of memorabilia, still periodically removed, catalogued and stored by museum curators. This weekend was typical: license plates, plastic children's toys, key rings, bandanas, military and police patches, an orange and white cheerleader's pompom, and for this occasion, several wreaths on portraits of victims.

Across the street, at St. Joseph's Old Cathedral, stands a nine-foot-tall statue of a weeping Jesus. One block away is a monument of a different sort: the new federal office building, a fortress-like structure of stone walls and blast-resistant glass patrolled by Federal Protective Service officers. Scott Pascoe, a National Park Service official greeting visitors, proudly said the new structure had been ranked by an architectural magazine as "the fourth-safest building in the world."

The museum where the Ryder truck axle is housed is in the 82-year old building of The Journal Record, a local business publication that had been across the street and whose damaged exterior, with a broken fire escape and scrawled messages from the rescuers, has been preserved.

The exhibit tells how Mr. McVeigh, fleeing the scene, was stopped by an Oklahoma highway patrolman, Charlie Hanger, famous locally as a stickler for traffic rules, who was within a quarter-mile of finishing his patrol on Interstate 35. Mr. McVeigh's rusty old car had dropped its license plate and he was carrying a pistol, so the trooper took him to the Noble County Jail in Perry. The sole judge on duty was busy, and while Mr. McVeigh waited, the F.B.I. was able to trace the vehicle to Elliot's Body Shop in Junction City, Kan., and make an identification. A computer search led to a frantic phone call that held him for arrest in the bombing.

The museum also gives a vivid picture of how an ordinary day turned into horror.

A tape recording from a machine on a plain office table has the voice of Lou Klaver, an official at the Oklahoma Water Resources Board - its building nearby was destroyed and two people were killed - opening a routine hearing on an application number 95-501 by Roy Wikle to pump and bottle water.

"There are nine elements," Ms. Klaver is heard to say, "that I have to receive information regarding -- "

The explosion booms, startling even when expected. The room goes dark. Next is videotape from the local Channel 9 news helicopter circling over the carnage.

"Wow," exclaims Jesse Gary, a reporter from the helicopter. "Holy cow! About a third of the building has been blown away!"

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Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Has Shaken His Christian Base

The New York Times
April 18, 2005
Ralph Reed's Zeal for Lobbying Has Shaken His Christian Base
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and PHILIP SHENON

ATLANTA - In 30 years of culture wars, few conservative Christian standard bearers have traveled further in American politics than Ralph Reed. The former head of the Christian Coalition has been a high-priced communications consultant, a top Bush campaign adviser, chairman of Georgia's Republican Party and now a candidate for lieutenant governor here.

Campaigning in early April at a Republican district meeting outside Atlanta, Mr. Reed talked of his small-town roots in northeast Georgia.

"I'm not going to forget where I came from," he said. "I am not going to forget what I stand for."

But as he completes his journey from Christian advocate to professional politician, Mr. Reed, 43, finds himself carrying some baggage: his ties to an old friend, the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos.

Mr. Reed declined to comment for this article; he has said publicly that he did not know that casino owners were paying for his services and that he has never deviated from his moral opposition to gambling. But the episode is a new blemish on the boyish face that once personified the rise of evangelical Christians to political power in America.

Some of Mr. Reed's past patrons - including the Rev. Pat Robertson, the Christian broadcaster who set Mr. Reed on the national stage by hiring him to run the Christian Coalition - say his work with Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients raises questions about how he has balanced his personal ambitions with his Christian principles.

"You know that song about the Rhinestone Cowboy, 'There's been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon,' " Mr. Robertson said. "The Bible says you can't serve God and Mammon."

In Georgia, Mr. Reed's rival in the Republican primary is playing up his links with Indian casinos to try to revive longstanding criticism from conservative Christian purists that Mr. Reed has sometimes put his own ambitions ahead of their goals. At the meeting near Atlanta, for example, his opponents were doing their best to sow doubts in the crowd.

"The Christian Coalition, they may have some shady background," said Robert McIntyre, the treasurer of the Spalding County Republican Party, who still wore a Ralph Reed sticker on his lapel. "I was being loyal to Ralph Reed, but since now some things have come up, I need to listen. I am now wavering."

Others argue, however, that shaking soiled hands is sometimes the price of making an impact.

"Thirty or 40 years ago, the people who you would see as the spokesmen for traditional values kind of things were people who were outsiders railing against the system," said Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. "And if they didn't get a hundred percent of what they believe in, they weren't going to play." Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who "understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody."

Bill Paxon, a former Congressman turned lobbyist who worked closely with Mr. Reed on Republican Congressional campaigns, said Mr. Reed was a man of many dimensions: a heartfelt Christian, a limited-government conservative and a canny political street fighter. "He was always all of the above," Mr. Paxon said.

Unlike most conservative Christian leaders, Mr. Reed was drawn to Republican politics first and evangelical faith later. He arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old Senate intern in 1981 and became executive director of the College Republican National Committee two years later, under Mr. Abramoff as chairman.

Mr. Abramoff was "a conservative firebrand," Mr. Reed wrote in his book "Active Faith." The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff's couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.

The same year he joined the College Republicans, Mr. Reed started attending an evangelical church and became born again. "I was a bare-knuckled political operative," Mr. Reed wrote in his book. "In the rough and tumble of politics, I began to sense the need for spiritual roots."

In 1988, Mr. Robertson hired Mr. Reed to build the Christian Coalition from his campaign organization. Mr. Reed became a hero to evangelical Christians who saw him as a fresh-faced, telegenic spokesman who could defend their views to the secular world of Sunday-morning talk shows and weekly magazines.

But he also boasted at times of working "under the cover of night" to mobilize grass-roots support. He honed his skills at organizing phone banks and direct-mail campaigns, and former associates say he talked in the cynical lingo of political operatives, referring to a candidate as "the body" and about fund-raising "dough."

"There is a duality to Ralph, the godly rhetoric and the hardball political operative, and what he says with his godly hat on is very different than with his political hat on," said Marshall Wittmann, who worked as legislative director of the Christian Coalition but is now a senior fellow at the centrist-liberal Democratic Leadership Council. "There are very few guardrails for Ralph when it comes to politics."

During his years at the Christian Coalition, his opponents and some evangelical Christians, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, sometimes argued that Mr. Reed put Republican political or economic goals ahead of social conservative policies. The Internal Revenue Service declined to renew the Christian Coalition's tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan group in 1999, concluding after a 10-year review that it had worked too closely with the Republican Party.

Soon after he left the organization in 1997, it nearly imploded as financial problems came to light.

At the time, Mr. Reed said he was starting a political consulting and communications firm "because I know there are hundreds of candidates out there who share the kind of values that I do." But his firm, Century Strategies, also took on deep-pocket corporate clients, including Verizon, Enron and Microsoft.

Some Christian conservatives were surprised. "Most of us in the movement are where we are because we believe in what we are doing," said the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. "I don't know any of us trying to get rich."

Some of Mr. Reed's efforts for clients soon drew criticism. While he was working as an adviser to George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, he also was working for Microsoft on a campaign to influence Mr. Bush and other presidential candidates about the company's antitrust battles. Mr. Reed later apologized for creating the appearance of a conflict.

In Georgia, some conservative Christians were troubled by Mr. Reed's consulting work for Mitch Skandalakis, a losing candidate for lieutenant governor who ran advertisements portraying one rival in racial stereotypes and another as a drug addict. (Mr. Reed said afterward that he opposed racially divisive tactics.)

"There are questions as to whether Mitch Skandalakis lined up well with the viewpoints of social and economic conservatives," said Randy Hicks, president of the Georgia Family Council. "And Ralph taking him on was not well received by an awful lot of people."

By 1999, Mr. Abramoff, who was well known as a lobbyist for Indian casinos, had hired Mr. Reed's firm to help organize antigambling campaigns in Texas and Louisiana.

Lisa Baron, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reed's firm, said that Mr. Abramoff had told Mr. Reed that the payment for his consulting services came from a "broad-based coalition" of antigambling groups. "We did not know who his specific clients were or their specific interests," Ms. Baron said.

In fact, Mr. Abramoff had recruited Mr. Reed to help the Coushatta Indians of Louisiana shut down or block casinos operated or proposed by the Tiguas, in neighboring Texas, or the Jena Band of Choctaws, in Louisiana, according to disclosures by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is investigating $82 million in lobbying fees that Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, reaped from tribes.

E-mail messages disclosed by the committee last year offered some unflattering views of Mr. Reed and Mr. Abramoff. In one, Mr. Reed forwarded potentially damaging information about Indian contributions to a politician supporting the casinos, saying, "We are getting this in the water with the right people."

In another, he called supportive legislators his "tigers." And he boasted of how he had gotten "our pastors all riled up" to push John Cornyn, who was then Texas attorney general and is now a senator, to close the Tigua casino. Mr. Cornyn, however, already had opposed gambling, according to a spokesman.

After a court ruled against the Tiguas' casino on Feb. 11, 2002, Mr. Abramoff wrote to Mr. Reed in an e-mail message: "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah."

Ms. Baron, Mr. Reed's spokeswoman, said that after the cost of direct mail, phone banks and radio advertising, his firm kept only 15 percent to 20 percent of the roughly $4 million it received from Mr. Abramoff between 1999 and 2002.

"Ralph is in the casino-closing business," she said, "and we ran a successful grass-roots campaign to close casinos and prevent casinos from operating."

Seven days after the "moolah" message, however, Mr. Abramoff sent the Tigua tribe an elaborate proposal that it pay him to help reopen the casino. Ms. Baron said that Mr. Reed had "no knowledge" of Mr. Abramoff's plan to seek business on both sides of that casino fight.

In the Christian conservative world that forms Mr. Reed's most natural political base, many say they accept his explanation. "He was betrayed by a friend who lied to him," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Tom Minnery, a vice president of Focus on the Family, said he did not know the facts. He said the group had often criticized Republican politicians, including Mr. DeLay, for taking money from gambling interests. Of Mr. Reed, Mr. Minnery said, "We wish he wouldn't have done that."

Mr. Reed's primary opponent, State Senator Casey Cagle, criticized him last week for inviting at least three lobbyists whose firms have worked for gambling concerns to a Washington fund-raiser tomorrow.

"Ralph has a lot of things he has got to answer for, like this gambling situation," said Joel McElhannon, a consultant to Mr. Cagle's campaign. "It strains believability that somebody hands him $4.2 million and he doesn't know where that money came from."

Among the Republican Party stalwarts at the meeting near Atlanta, though, many were eager to snap pictures of themselves and their families with Mr. Reed. In his speech, he omitted references to God, prayer, abortion, obscenity or the Christian Coalition, instead echoing President Bush's inaugural themes about spreading democracy abroad.

"We are so proud of him when he gets on television because he speaks for people like me, true conservative Republicans, and it is such a breath of fresh air to see someone who can go toe to toe with the people who don't," said Jean Studdard, a local Republican official.

"We really haven't heard anything about the Indian gambling thing yet," she added. "Of course, we want to hear Ralph's side of the story."

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Atlanta for this article, and Philip Shenon from Washington.

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Jobs

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Good Friend

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Kiss Up Kick Down

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To the edge

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Mutually Assured Destruction

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Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time

The New York Times
April 17, 2005

Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time
By FRANK RICH

A scandal is like any other melodrama: It can't be a crowd pleaser unless the audience can follow the plot. That's why Monica Lewinsky trumped Whitewater, and that's why of all the story lines ensnaring Tom DeLay, the one with legs is the one with the craps tables. It's not just easy to follow, but it also has a combustive cultural element that makes it as representative of its political era as Monicagate was of the Clinton years. As the lies and subterfuge of the go-go 1990's coalesced around sex, so the scandal of our new "moral values" decade comes cloaked in religion. The hair shirt is the new thong.

This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.

Beltway cronyism, dubious junkets, loophole-laden denials are all, of course, time-honored Washington fare. The few on the right backing away from Mr. DeLay, from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to Newt Gingrich, make a point of reminding us of that. As they see it, more in sorrow than in anger, the Gingrich revolutionaries who vowed to end the corruption practiced by Congressional Democrats have now been infected by the same Washington virus as their opponents. That's true, but this critique of Mr. DeLay and company by their own camp all too conveniently sidesteps the distinguishing feature of this scandal. Democratic malefactors like Jim Wright and L.B.J.'s old fixer Bobby Baker didn't wear the Bible on their sleeves.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

But it's not merely Christian denominations that figure in the religious plumage of this crowd. Mr. Abramoff, who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr. Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman, actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.

Another Abramoff crony is the political operative Ralph Reed, whom Mr. Abramoff hired for his College Republicans operation in the early 1980's. Mr. Reed, who has called gambling "a cancer on the body politic" and is running for lieutenant governor in Georgia, is now busily explaining that he, like Mr. DeLay, had no idea that some of his consulting firm's Abramoff-Scanlon paydays ($4.2 million worth) were indirect transfers of casino dough. Mr. Reed, of course, is best known for his stint as the public altar boy's face of Pat Robertson's political machine, the Christian Coalition.

It was at a Christian Coalition convention in Washington in 1994 that I first encountered yet another religious figure who pops up in this tale, the South African-born Rabbi Daniel Lapin. He was regaling the crowd with scriptural passages proving that high taxes are "immoral." Now the show rabbi of the Christian right, Rabbi Lapin has moved on to bigger broadcast pulpits. When he's not preaching the virtues of "The Passion of the Christ," he is chastising "Meet the Fockers" for promoting "vile notions of Jews" that "are not too different from those used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels." He apparently didn't like the idea that Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman played characters who enjoy sex.

Rabbi Lapin, according to Slate, is the networker who jump-started the mutually beneficial business relationship of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay by introducing them in the early 90's. That was some mitzvah. As Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition lobbyist who later jumped to the Democratic Leadership Council, told me recently, "We now see the meaning of Judeo-Christian values."

The values alleged so far in this scandal - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belong to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. They are not exclusive to either political party. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.

It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay's threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they've got a political Armageddon on their hands. Mr. DeLay got the message, sort of. At his Wednesday news conference, he tried to dial back some of his words, if only as a way of changing the subject from Indians and his own potential outings in a court of law. Unlike Bill Frist, he has yet to sign on to next Sunday's national Christian right telecast bashing what its organizer, the Family Research Council, calls "out-of-control courts."

Many believe that Mr. DeLay's legal fate is tied to that of Mr. Abramoff, whom the congressman has now downsized into one of "hundreds of relationships I have in Washington, D.C." Mr. Abramoff, intriguingly enough, hasn't always been a creature of the capital. He was raised in Beverly Hills, the town that is supposed to be anathema to every value that Republican theocrats stand for. And he returned there for a time in the late 1980's, when he produced an anti-Communist action film called "Red Scorpion." Once it was reported that extras and military equipment had been supplied by South Africa's racist government, Arthur Ashe's Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid condemned the film, and no major studio would touch it. But it opened nationwide nonetheless, to few customers and many protesters.

In 1992 Mr. Abramoff, eager to prove that he was unlike secular show-business Democrats, told The Hollywood Reporter that he was starting a Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment to emulate Christian anti-indecency campaigns. (He didn't.) But "Red Scorpion," on which Mr. Abramoff shares the writing credit, has many more four-letter words than "Meet the Fockers," as well as violence, bloodied beefcake (Dolph Lundgren's) and crucifixion imagery anticipating "The Passion of the Christ."

Though Mr. Abramoff has closed his yeshiva and is now being sued for back wages by its former employees, his cinematic creation survives on DVD. "Red Scorpion" is seriously Godawful, but, unlike the Ten Commandments displayed in Tom DeLay's office, it may yet endure as a permanent monument to what these people are about.

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Frist Likely to Push for Ban on Filibusters

Yahoo! News

Frist Likely to Push for Ban on Filibusters

Fri Apr 15, 1:46 PM ET

By Charles Babington, Washington Post Staff Writer

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is all but certain to press for a rule change that would ban filibusters of judicial nominations in the next few weeks, despite misgivings by some of his fellow Republicans and a possible Democratic backlash that could paralyze the chamber, close associates said yesterday.

The strategy carries significant risks for the Tennessee Republican, who is weighing a 2008 presidential bid. It could embroil the Senate in a bitter stalemate that would complicate passage of President Bush's agenda and raise questions about Frist's leadership capabilities. Should he fail to make the move or to get the necessary votes, however, Frist risks the ire of key conservative groups that will play big roles in the 2008 GOP primaries.

Frist feels he has no acceptable options to seeking the rule change unless there is a last-minute compromise, which neither party considers plausible, according to senators and aides close to the situation. "I think it's going to happen," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said this week, although he would prefer that Frist wait to allow more legislation to pass before the Senate explodes in partisan recriminations. Aides privy to senior Republicans' thinking concur with Thune.

In response to the rising stakes and sense of an inevitable showdown, Frist and his allies are churning out speeches, articles and talking points, and enlisting the aid of Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the National Republican Committee. Frist said he is trying to catch up to Democrats and their allies, who set up a Capitol "war room" and are spending millions of dollars on TV ads denouncing the proposed rule change -- or "nuclear option" -- as a power grab.

Frist aides said he still hopes to offer a compromise Democrats might accept, but Democrats who have spoken with him say they would be astonished if he presents something they could go along with.

Democrats have used the filibuster to prevent confirmation votes this year for seven of President Bush's appellate court nominees, whom the Democrats say are too conservative. Filibusters can be stopped only by 60 votes in the 100-member Senate. Republicans, who hold 55 seats, say the filibusters thwart the Senate's constitutional duty to approve or reject a president's appointees. Democrats say the Founding Fathers wanted to empower the Senate's minority members to slow or stop controversial legislation and nominees.

While Democrats and Republicans alike say the filibuster issue is a matter of high principles and constitutional rights, Frist's choice is inextricably linked to presidential politics. At least two GOP colleagues who are pressing him to seek the rule change -- George Allen (Va.) and Rick Santorum (Pa.) -- also are weighing presidential bids. Both of them are wooing key conservatives clamoring for the filibuster ban.

Some independent analysts say that Frist -- a comparative newcomer to politics who unexpectedly gained the majority leader's post in early 2003 -- has created his own dilemma, and his handling of it will be an sign of whether he has the skills to seriously vie for the White House.

"I think Senator Frist has backed himself into a corner where I don't see how he can avoid pulling the nuclear trigger," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. In terms of a presidential race, Cook said, "it hurts if he doesn't come up with the votes. But it also hurts him if the Senate comes to a grinding halt and can't get anything done. I think the guy's in a real jam."

Conservative activists are giving Frist little wiggle room. "If Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hopes to capture the Republican nomination for president in 2008, then he has to see to it that the Bush judicial nominees are confirmed," Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, wrote in a recent article. "If he fails, then he is dead as a presidential wannabe."

Frist says he is basing his decision on constitutional principles, not politics. "I just want a reasonable up-or-down vote on the judicial nominees that come to the floor," he said this week, so that senators can "give advice and consent, which is our constitutional responsibility. It is something that we absolutely must have."

Frist had mixed results yesterday in his scramble to find 50 Republicans who will promise to vote for the rule change (Vice President Cheney could break a 50-50 tie in Frist's favor). Sen. Thad Cochran (news, bio, voting record) (R-Miss.) said he will side with his party's leader, but Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ariz.) told MSNBC, "I will vote against the nuclear option . . . because we won't always be in the majority."

Some allies say Frist can burnish his image if he wins the judicial nominations fight. "From a political point of view, if he's forced to change the Senate rules to end the filibusters, that will only help him in the Republican primary for president," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former presidential candidate. "It's a top issue among most Republican primary voters."

Alexander said Democrats "are badly misreading this politically" if they think the public would blame Republicans for a Senate breakdown orchestrated by Democrats. GOP aides say Frist has drawn the same conclusion. Nonetheless, Senate Democrats are vowing a scorched-earth response, noting that a single senator can dramatically slow down the chamber's work by insisting on time-consuming procedures that are normally bypassed by "unanimous consent."

They also are portraying Frist as a tool of GOP extremists. Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), asked this week if the radical right is driving Frist and his lieutenants, replied: "If they decide to do this, which it appears they are going to, the answer is unequivocally -- underlined, underscored -- yes."

Santorum and Allen, meanwhile, are pressing Frist to act. "We've got to go for it, call their bluff," Allen said in an interview. In talking with Frist, he said, "I've been prodding, goading, encouraging such action. I think we need to move sooner rather than later."

"If there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court" -- which many senators expect this summer -- "we want the playing field set," said Allen, a former college football player. But only Frist, he said, "can call the snap."

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Arms Equipment Plundered in 2003 Is Surfacing in Iraq

The New York Times
April 17, 2005
Arms Equipment Plundered in 2003 Is Surfacing in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ

KIRKUK, Iraq, April 16 - Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings.

Looters stormed the sites two years ago when Mr. Hussein's government fell, and the fate of much of the equipment has remained a mystery.

But on a recent day near the Iranian border, resting in great chunks on a weedy lot in front of an Iraqi Border Patrol warehouse, were pieces of machine tools, some weighing as much as a car, that investigators say formed the heart of a factory that made artillery shells near Baghdad. Military equipment, including parts for obscure armaments used by Mr. Hussein's army, is also turning up in Baghdad and Mosul in the north, they say.

For more than a year, large quantities of scrap metal from some of the sites have routinely been filling the scrap yards of Iraq and neighboring countries like Jordan. But with this new emergence of a huge panoply of intact factory, machine and vehicle parts, it appears that some looters may have held back the troves they stole two years ago, waiting for prices to rise.

"Spare parts?" said Staff Sgt. William Larock, an American reservist in a division out of Rochester, N.Y., who is stationed near Munthriya and is coordinating repairs of some of Mr. Hussein's old troop carriers to be used for the new Iraqi Army. "A lot of them come from the market in Baghdad."

Sergeant Larock said that some of his repairs to the vehicles, which Mr. Hussein bought from a manufacturer in Brazil, were being delayed because the asking price on the highly specialized wheels - clearly stolen long ago from those same vehicles - was too high. "That's why these things are sitting on blocks," he said with a faint smile.

Interviews with people who identified themselves as arms dealers or members of the resistance in Baghdad, Falluja and other Iraqi cities indicate that a parallel black market operates in the explosives looted from some of the same sites. In fact, sketchy descriptions by members of the Iraqi resistance suggest that the arms market is also a highly developed enterprise with brokers, buyers and looters who have stockpiled their products, including artillery shells, mortar rounds and Kalashnikov rifles. One former Iraqi army officer who said that he had joined the mujahedeen said that in Sadr City, for example, a few trusted brokers would take prospective buyers to weapons caches that ranged in size from a few rounds buried in a garden to whole rooms of ordnance. If the broker and the buyers agreed on a price, the buyers would arrive a day or two later with a vehicle to drive their purchases away. The broker and the stockpilers would have worked out their respective cuts in advance.

Witnesses described looters of varying degrees of sophistication, from local people who stormed the sites in search of precious metals after Mr. Hussein's security forces fled to highly organized operations that arrived with cranes and semitrailer trucks. Some of the most organized groups arrived earliest and drove away with largely intact equipment.

When it comes to buying run-of-the-mill equipment and spare parts that were obviously looted in the past, the American military appears to have adopted some version of a don't-ask, don't-tell policy concerning where the materials originated. The materials, after all, are now being sold openly in street markets. So the Americans appear resigned to buying the equipment back rather than seizing it.

But the pieces of the artillery factory were headed to Iran when they were seized a few months ago by Iraqi border guards. They appeared to have been cut apart just so; the dismemberment allowed the material to meet the official definition of scrap, but did no damage that would prevent the pieces from being reassembled.

"They cut in places that were not important," said Brig. Gen. Nazim Shariff Muhammad, leader of the Iraqi Border Guard in Diyala Province, standing with his right foot perched on part of the machinery. "So they let us think it was going to be used as scrap metal."

Much more valuable machinery also vanished from some of the sites in the weeks after the invasion: so-called dual-use equipment, which could be used in civilian manufacturing and in building parts for nuclear weapons. Witness accounts have indicated that much of it was carried off in systematic looting in the six to eight weeks after Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. That equipment, which investigators say was more likely coveted for its monetary value rather than its military value, disappeared without any public trace. If an entire artillery factory could come this close to crossing the border, some military specialists say, then the dual-use equipment had a chance of getting out as well.

From Baghdad's main roads, Munthriya is the nearest border crossing, making it a natural way station for anything transported, legitimately or not, from the area around the capital.

That part of the Iraqi frontier, about 90 miles northeast of Baghdad and just south of Kurdistan, is a place out of time. For reasons that seem to be lost in the mists of history, many of the border outposts of Iraq and Iran look like miniature castles, complete with crenelated walls and cylindrical watchtowers at the corners. The outposts face each other across a no man's land of grassy hills that are still heavily mined, a legacy of the Iran-Iraq war. In the hazy distance, the Iranian mountains rise. "They are watching us," said Warrant Officer Aso Ahmed Showkat at the border post called Yassin Castle, pointing to one of the Iranian outposts.

In the weeks after Baghdad fell, the roads in that part of Iraq were choked with trucks carrying scrap metal, looted generators, cars, chopped-up tanks and other equipment, many witnesses said. Mukhtar Ahmed, who owns a tea shop in Bashmakh, north of Munthriya, estimated that as many as 300 trucks a day passed his shop at the height of the activity.

Lt. Col. Ali Muhammad Darweesh Al Kakay, who came south in that period with a Kurdish pesh merga force and is now a border official, said, "Everything, you can smuggle at that time."

Since the border patrol began mobilizing in June 2003, General Nazim said, the border had been secure, and only scrap dealers with government permits had been allowed to transport materials into Iran through the Munthriya crossing. Specific rules for what constituted scrap had been set up. A tank, for example, had to be cut into at least eight pieces, or it was judged that someone could put it back together.

In General Nazim's view, the episode of the artillery factory is a case in point. His border guards told him that there were eight or nine large trucks filled with odd-looking scrap. "But the materials inside the trucks were not scrap," he said. "I knew this was something very strange."

Engineers identified the equipment as a set of huge machine tools for making shells, and pinpointed where it had all come from: a military site called Al Walid, near Baghdad.

Now somewhat rusted from exposure, the material sits in front of the border police headquarters, and in a fitting twist, some of its more precious components have been looted a second time.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the story of the artillery factory was not necessarily reassuring.

"This is just the stuff that got caught," Mr. Pike said when a reporter contacted him from Forward Operating Base Cobra, an American Army base near the border. "The more interesting stuff would have gone out first," he said.

Warzer Jaff contributed reporting for this article.

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Congress Renews Interest in Identity Theft

Yahoo! News
AP

Congress Renews Interest in Identity Theft

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Responding to outrage from consumers whose personal information has been stolen from companies, Congress is primed to pass new laws to try to prevent break-ins and to require businesses to confess to customers when private data is taken.

The government's new interest in requiring such embarrassing disclosures reverses years of efforts by the FBI and U.S. prosecutors to shield corporations that have been victims of hackers from bad publicity by keeping such crimes out of headlines.

But now, consumers want to know if their private information has been stolen.

The Senate is considering at least two proposals to crack down on companies suffering breaches of private customer information. The Federal Trade Commission's chairwoman has endorsed the idea and the Senate Judiciary Committee's chairman hinted this week that a new law might be inevitable.

"We may well face a necessity for some really tough legislation," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

The new push for government action responds to frustrated constituents who are among more than 10 million victims of identity theft each year. It comes after years of reluctance by most companies to voluntarily report break-ins that put customers' financial information at risk.

"Congress is primed to take a very serious look at this and pass comprehensive legislation," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., sponsor for one bill. "Nobody has given this problem the focus it deserves. This is a high priority."

A California law already requires disclosures to victimized consumers who live there, and roughly 30 states are looking at similar laws.

"The last thing a merchant wants to do is tell all his longtime customers he's been hacked and lost all their information," said Keath Nupuf, chief technology officer for CardCops Inc. of Malibu, Calif. The company monitors Internet chat rooms and other hacker communications for stolen credit card numbers, then notifies merchants and consumers to block bad purchases.

CardCops contacted 80 consumers earlier this week to report their card numbers and other personal details were circulating among Internet thieves, Nupuf said. The card numbers were pilfered from merchants that range from mom-and-pop shops to Fifth Avenue retailers.

"One guy was blowing a blood vessel," he said. "He was going to drive across country and kill the merchant."

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a computer expert who consulted for the White House during the Bush and Clinton administrations, often is hired by companies to tighten security and clean up the digital mess after a data breach. Zatko said victim companies "almost never" tell the FBI or customers when sensitive data is stolen.

"Maybe they have a government contract and it would look bad," Zatko said. "Maybe they're trying to keep it quiet so they don't scare the financial markets."

Sometimes companies warn customers. Howard Schmidt, a former White House adviser, said thieves took a computer this year from the store where he buys eyeglasses. The computer contained his credit and medical information, Schmidt said, but the owner contacted his customers and encouraged them to watch for fraudulent purchases.

"That was a good thing," Schmidt said. "I want to do business with these guys."

In a twist, the FBI and Justice Department have worked aggressively to shield the identities of corporations that have been hacking victims. To encourage businesses to contact them after such break-ins, U.S. investigators and prosecutors have publicly promised to seal court records, keep top executives off witness stands and use protective orders to keep details of these crimes out of the headlines.

"There is still some reluctance to call law enforcement, some hesitancy because of the negative impact on reputation," said Amit Yoran, the Bush administration's former top cyber-security official. He said requiring companies to acknowledge a break-in "may be of value, but it should not be done as a knee-jerk reaction to the handful of high-profile and significant disclosures of the past few weeks."

The FTC chairwoman, Deborah Majoras, estimated consumers lost $5 billion and businesses lost $48 billion because of identity theft in 2003. The FTC is studying how it can use existing banking statutes and laws against consumer fraud to prosecute companies that fail to report serious breaches.

Majoras said government should consider requiring companies to tell customers about break-ins when thefts put them at financial risk. She also endorsed minimum security requirements for businesses that collect sensitive personal information.

"The challenge is to come up with a way of defining when notice should be sent and when it doesn't make sense," said Joel Winston, associate director at the FTC's division for financial practices.

___

On the Net:

Federal Trade Commission: http://www.ftc.gov

CardCops: http://www.cardcops.com

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Pakistan Airports on Alert After Terror Threat

Yahoo! News
Reuters

Pakistan Airports on Alert After Terror Threat

KARACHI (Reuters) - Two of Pakistan's international airports were put on high alert on Friday because of a terror threat, a security official said.

"We have put Karachi and Lahore international airports on high-security alert after some specific aviation-related threats," Major Riaz Ahmad, a spokesman for the Airport Security Force, told Reuters.

"Security at both these airport has been beefed up on an intelligence report," he said without providing details.

Earlier this week, the U.S. consulate in Karachi remained closed for three days after its officials received threatening telephone calls.

It was not clear whether the threats were linked.

There have been a spate of terror assaults in major Pakistani cities since Islamabad joined the U.S.-led war on terror following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Police blame Islamic extremists for targeting Western concerns, religious minorities and top government officials in an attempt to undermine their country's support for the United States.

Last year, airports in Pakistan were put on high security alert several times.

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Deadly flu samples still missing

BBC NEWS

Deadly flu samples still missing

Samples of a potentially lethal flu strain sent to Lebanon and Mexico did not reach the respective laboratories, the World Health Organization says.

The WHO said it was trying to trace the samples, which were sent by a US testing organisation.

The samples are of Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968.

More than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries received the testing kits and have been racing to destroy the virus.

The WHO says the virus could "easily cause an influenza epidemic" if not handled properly.

All but five of the countries outside US that received the kits say they have now destroyed them.


WHERE THE VIRUS WENT
Europe: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy
Americas: Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the US
Asia: Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan
Middle East: Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia

The WHO has not said how much had been destroyed in US labs, which received the vast majority of the samples.

The College of American Pathologists (Cap) said the kits had been sent to the following countries including the US: Bermuda, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan.

But the man who co-ordinates the WHO global influenza programme, Klaus Stohr, told the BBC News website that the one laboratory in Lebanon that was supposed to have been sent the kits had not received any. And one out of four laboratories in Mexico had not had any consignment either.

Mr Stohr said the WHO and Cap were trying to find out what happened to the samples sent by prestigious international carriers.

He said it was possible that the laboratories had not gone to collect the kits. However, he said the WHO was not concerned at this stage.

"There are simpler ways of interfering with the samples" if one so wished, Mr Stohr said.

No immunity

Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it - and current vaccines do not guard against it.

The Cap sent out kits between October 2004 and February of this year.

On 8 April, the US government asked the body to write to the laboratories affected - of which 61 are outside the US and Canada - telling them to destroy the samples.

Given the concerns that the virus could be used in bio-terrorism, letters were sent to the laboratories before the mistake was made public.

The virus - technically known as H2N2 - was classified as Biological Safety Level 2, meaning that it was not considered particularly dangerous.

But the US government agency responsible for classifying viruses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it was in the process of deciding whether to change the strain's classification when it found out it had been widely circulated.

The WHO says there is no guarantee that every sample of the virus can be traced and destroyed because some of the laboratories may have sent derivatives of the sample elsewhere.

But there have been no reports of anyone becoming ill from handling the virus.

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Home workers 'pose security risk'

BBC NEWS

Home workers 'pose security risk'

Working from home could pose a security threat to British businesses, costing an estimated £8.5bn a year, an IT security company has warned.

A study by Novell found 80% of Britons admit to not taking computer security precautions when working from home.

The research shows home workers are "ambivalent" to security issues, making them easy targets for hackers.

Novell says there will be an increase in security breaches if employees at home are left unchecked.

Easy target

Standard IT procedures are more likely to be ignored, and home workers are more prone to surfing the net and downloading virus-infected programmes, the company says.

The survey found British home workers to be more concerned with distractions from the television, "feeling lonely" and "missing the buzz of the office", than exposure to security breaches.

This, the company says, is making them an easy target for computer viruses and hackers.

The study also revealed three quarters of the British workforce want to work from home, while over half of British businesses have the resources to allow it.

Novell UK managing director Steve Brown said: "The benefits of having a more flexible workforce are clear, but the dangers are sometimes less obvious.

"As the numbers of home workers grow, so does the number of security risks to businesses.

Mr Brown said the only way to protect against the growing security threat was for businesses to take the responsibility off home workers.

"Successful and secure home and remote working is absolutely achievable," he added.

"If bosses feel comfortable that their employees aren't opening the door to IT security threats from their living room, workers will be one step closer to the benefits of flexible working."

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Security scare hits HSBC's cards

BBC NEWS
Security scare hits HSBC's cards
A security scare in the US has prompted global banking giant HSBC to send out warning letters to 180,000 customers.

Holders of the General Motors GM Mastercard, issued by HSBC, are being informed that criminals may have gained access to their credit card details.

The breach occurred at a retailer, HSBC said. The Wall Street Journal claims that those being contacted had shopped at clothing firm Polo Ralph Lauren.

Credit card fraud and identity theft is a growing problem in the US and Europe.

Keeping quiet

HSBC said it was doing everything that was "humanly possible" to resolve the situation.

A representative at Polo Ralph Lauren in New York said the company was not commenting on the Wall Street Journal's story at this stage.

Recent mishaps have drawn attention to how companies protect personal information, especially if they sell this information on to insurance firms, law enforcement agencies and possible employers.

The US Senate has been hearing testimony from executives at LexisNexis, a database and information company owned by publishing giant Reed Elsevier.

LexisNexis has admitted that the personal details of 310,000 people have been improperly accessed since January 2003.

On Wednesday, executives from the firm said that there may have been earlier unreported breaches of security.

Choicepoint, a firm that verifies personal information for banks, business and governments, has also had problems, admitting that data on 145,000 people had been compromised.

US law currently does not require firms to inform clients of a security alert.

It is up the individual states to legislate and critics claim that - as a result - there is a lack of national cohesion in efforts to fight credit card fraud.

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Bush Disarms, Unilaterally

The New York Times
April 15, 2005

Bush Disarms, Unilaterally
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.

We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.

It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.

Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."

Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.

"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...

"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."

South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan - not us. By investing heavily in these new technologies, Mr. Bleha notes, these nations will be the first to reap their benefits - from increased productivity to stronger platforms for technological innovation; new kinds of jobs, services and content; and rising standards of living.

Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex. Tax cuts can't solve every problem. This administration - which often seems more interested in indulging creationism than spurring creativity - is doing a very poor job of preparing the country for that next level.

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